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BODY AND SOUL 



A COURSE OF LECTURES 

DELIVERED IN THE TRANCE 6TATE 

THROUGH THE MEDIUMISTIC ORGANIZATION 

OF 

J. OLEGG WRIGHT. 



ji-^ 



PUBLISHED BY 

J. CLEGG WRIGHT, 

Amelia, Ohio, 

1902, 



THE LIBRARY eF 

GONG«eSS, 
Two Coi^ies Receives 

FEB. I! 1902 

CLASS ^^ XXck Mcs. 

COPY a 






K^ 



Entered according to Act of Congress in the year 1902, by 

J, CLEGG WRIGHT, 
in the office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 



:f :e^ E IF .A_ o E . 



This volume is given to the public in the hope that it 
may be a small contribution to the great study of the soul 
and the real functions of the mind. The extraordinary 
phenomena presented by Modern Spiritualism have drawn 
much attention to their cause and value in estimating the 
possibilities of conscious continuance of life after the death 
of the body ; they throw light on the subject of immortality 
and the conditions of life in the future state, and will more 
and more, as time goes on, become the serious study of those 
who are seeking for a scientific basis for the belief in immor- 
tality, and a future life for the children of the human race. 

Metaphysical thinkers have become so wedded to the 
deductive method that they have ignored all inductive 
process of the mind being applied to the problems of the 
soul, its existence and future continuance ; they have 
simply contented themselves with a speculative philosophy 
of the mind, and dogmatized in fields where their knowl- 
edge could not go. With the great advancement of mod- 
ern science and its methods has arisen a desire to apply 
the same formula of investigation and reason to the prob- 
lems of the soul. The truth is, science is the great con- 
queror of all truth, and nature is the field in which man 
must look for the foundation of all his facts and laws for 
and on which he can postulate the great principles of 
Being and Power. The different states of consciousness 
seen presented in the processes of action and change to the 
human mind are within the range and grasp of a correct 
scientific examination and study. Philosophy must walk 



iv Preface. 

in the path of facts, and give to them order, plan and law. 
It must cease to be the product of unsupported general- 
izations and postulates. Science demands that the facts 
be the basis of correct philosophy, and it must ever con- 
cede truth to demonstration, and the hopes and dreams 
of ages must go before the revelations of nature under the 
eye of science. The powers of the soul must be studied in 
the same manner as we study other phenomena presented 
by nature. The strangest of facts must be noted with care, 
and their full value taken. Those who have old theories 
and beliefs to save from destruction cannot easily enter into 
these investigations. The past has made man a slave to 
error, and superstition has been the bond and thrall of the 
human race for ages. The truly scientific man follows the 
light of reason : the dictates of truth must be obeyed. 

It is obvious that if evidence can be found anywhere 
tending to prove the immortality of the soul, it must be 
found in the domain of mental action called the abnormal. 
Sometimes we call that abnormal which is only elemental 
in its power and nature as a function of mind. There are 
often seen degrees of clairvoyance that are so close to the 
condition of hallucination that it is difficult to separate 
the two conditions. The facts of the dream-state some- 
times come so close to the waking-state that it is hard to 
separate one state from the other. There are difficulties 
in all studies. The dream consciousness, the trance con- 
sciousness, and the clairvoyant consciousness are different 
phases or planes on which we see presented the evidence 
of a soul, its power of independent thought, ability to 
transcend the reach of organic function and common 
mental action, as presented in the sense consciousness. 



Preface. v 

The lectures collected and published in this volume 
were most of them given in the city of Washington, D. C, 
and reported by Mr. F. WiiiLiAMS, and to his great kind- 
ness I am obligated for the lectures as they stand here as 
delivered by me while in the trance state. This state, as 
seen in me, is a state of perfect sleep, that is, the conscious, 
normal mind is suspended, and the trance mind, with a 
changed personality, appears and becomes the possessor 
of the organism for the time being. 

The trance consciousness is always accompanied with a 
changed personality. The personality on its own plane 
of action is complete. The consciousness has a separate 
field of knowledge and perception. It has also the power 
to give and take from the normal organic personality. 
The knowledge of the medium in this state can be drawn 
upon and used, and knowledge that is not in the organic 
normal mind can be given to it, and, under suitable con- 
ditions, this knowledge will be retained after the manner 
that dreams are recollected and remembered after as facts 
of consciousness. 

The portrait accompaning this volume was made by 
the late and lamented Henry J. Newton, of New York 
city, so long and so deservedly known as a supporter of 
all truth as presented by modern science, and the facts 
and phenomena of modern spiritualism in particular. 

With dutiful respect to my readers I leave the lectures 
to speak for themselves, asking a kind generosity in judg- 
ment, as the themes treated lie so far away from the 
ordinary tracks of common thought and investigation. 
Yours in good faith, 

J. CLEGG WRIGHT. 

Amelia, O., January 8th, 1902. 



MY STRUGGLE, 



Long did I toil amid the sand. The stones 

Oft cut my feet, but I went onward to the goal. 

The nights were dark, the skies were black, 

But on I went, with seldom a star to light my path. 

Stumbling I often fell, yet in pain went on. 

For voices bade me rise and walk, and labor to complete 

my task ; 
And charming dreams did lure me to fancied paradise. 

I tarried oft and sought the waters, for I was athirst, 
But there was none, the river bed was dry ; 
And thus I toiled and wandered far to find the end. 
Oh, could I have but seen how long and hard the road 
I would have fainted long before the goal was reached. 
A solitary star of night shone out, and then the bars of 

night gave 
Way before the birth of the lordly morn that 
Led to the greater glories of the day. 

Then spirits came, and with their glorious breath 
breathed 
Into my torpid brain the thought of other spheres. 

Lo, like a current of warm air, I spoke 
The thoughts as though the force of heaven 
Directed me to speak. 

The thought was trained to meet the wants of heart 
and brain. 

And so I labored. 

My labor then was so to live 
That I might be a perfect channel for the souls 
Walking the ethereal plane and loving man. 
And so I struggled on — am struggling still- 
To be the instrument atuned with harmonious strings 
Whereon spirits can play their truthful psalms of life, 
And give through me a legacy of thought to man. 



J. CLEGG WRIGHT AND HIS INSPIRATIONS. 



Touring in Florida and other South-lands last winter, 
to avoid the intense cold of Michigan, it was my good 
fortune to have the privilege of listening to a course of 
J. Clegg Wright's special lectures — lectures adapted 
to thinkers, students, historians, metaphysicians, and ad- 
vanced occultists. 

The hereditary fortune of Mr. Wright was cranial 
rather than financial. It is brains that tell, and especially 
so when touched by the promethean fires of heaven. 
Gifted naturally with a nervo- organization and a high 
order of intellect, Mr. Wright presented to the open 
vision of the spirit world the grand opportunity for sue* 
cessful mediumistic infiuence in the interest of humanity. 

A brilliant, invisible intelligence, known on earth as 
George Rushton, of high English ancestiy, and whose 
identity has been abundantly established, discovering the 
sensitive, highly-tuned organization of Mr. Wright, with 
its deep far-reaching, yet comparatively undeveloped 
possibilities, made him his intermediary instrument for 
teaching to the world the higher truths of the spiritual 
philosophy. 

During the last fifty years and over I have seen in this 
and foreign lands at least three thousand mediums con- 



viii J. Clegg Wright and his Inspirations. 

trolled, some consciously and others unconsciously by 
discarnate spirits, and others still psychically touched by 
angel fingers, but I never saw two influenced precisely 
alike. 

The subject of this writing, richly gifted with trance, 
impressional and inspirational mediumship, takes in, when 
in his superior state, a wide horizon of history, its found- 
ers of nations, governments and institutions ; its patriots, 
martyrs, poets, sages, statesmen, metaphysicians and savi- 
ours, enriched with the wisdom of the spheres as now 
enunciated by those coronated lords in the heavens. 

Inspiration is both universal and special. It is a divine 
inbreathing, which Plato pronounced "the source of all 
that is sublime and beautiful in man." Pythagoras com- 
pared it to suggestions coming from the "gods and 
revealing hidden things." Anaxagoras, 500 B. C, main- 
tained that inspiration was the work of invisible spirits. 
Homer said it came direct from heaven. Cicero pro- 
nounced it "the divine breath." "It is not ye who 
speak," said Jesus, "but the spirit within you." So it is 
not our worthy brother Wright that speaks, but rather 
the divine breath, the inspiration of philosophers, sages 
and the spirits of our ascended loved ones. 

Extensive as my travels and exhaustive as my studies 
have been in the line of psychic science, with its varied 
intertwining branches of research, I say deliberately that 
I never listened to such profundity of thought and radiant 
overflow of wisdom and science as streamed in golden 
sentences from that exalted spirit, Rushton, through the 
lips of J. CijEGG Wright. Conscientious mediumship is 
the gateway to immortality. 



J. Clegg Wright and his Inspirations. ix 

True, in the midst of his uplifting discourses, he would 
sometimes be sympathetically approached by perhaps 
Humbolt, Shelley, Dalton, — or by Proctus, some Egyptian 
Hierophant, or some Assyrian sage, correcting some old 
historical mistake, or giving a true version of some ancient 
nation's downfall, crowned with a Jefferson's warning con- 
cerning our own country. 

The references of Rushton to Confucius, Socrates, Jesus, 
Plotinus, Epictetus, Bruno, and other great moral heroes, 
were not only historic, poetic and scholastic, but they 
were revelations of and from a mighty soul long summer- 
ing in the heavens. This inspiring spirit is also an adept 
in the highest sense of science, grasping atoms, molecules, 
cells, laws of vibration, and the methods of worlds' form- 
ations. 

These lectures of Mr. Wright are not a set of cut-and- 
dried platitudes, that Rushton, parrot-like, repeats through 
him from camp to camp. No, they are comparable to a 
living, bubbling fountain, whose crystal drops are seem- 
ingly innumerable. This invisible spirit Rushton is cer- 
tainly very exalted, and in sympathetic touch with the 
royal-souled reformers and martyrs of the olden ages. The 
choicest elements and the best value of all literature, 
ancient or modern, lie in the ideal of the spiritual world. 
Homer was beggared when shorn of his draft on the 
spiritual; Tasso, uninspired, could not have delivered his 
"Jerusalem;" Dante failed when he had no vision of the 
hells; Bunyan abandoned his "Pilgrim" when his angel 
left him ; Milton was shut away from Paradise when the 
heavenly messenger withdrew ; but Shakespear's ghost 
would not down. Hamlet alone saw his father's ghost, 



X J. Clegg Wright and his Inspirations. 

and Macbeth that of Banqo. Hamlet and Horatio waited 
to lay the ghost of the murdered King : 

'■'■Ham. What hour now? 
Hor. I think it lacks of twelve. 

ENTER GHOST. 

Ham. Angels and ministers of grace defend us ! 
Be thou a Spirit of health or goblin damned; 
Bring with thee airs of heaven or blasts of hell ; 
Be thy intents wicked or charitable ; 
Thou comest in such questionable shape 
That I will speak to thee: 
Why has the sepulcher unlocked 
His ponderous and marble jaws 
To cast thee up again ? 

Ghost. I am thy father's spirit, 
, Doomed for a certain time to walk the night, 

And, for the day, confined to fast in fires 
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature 
Are burnt and purged away." 

Personally knowing J. Clegg Wright's industry, men- 
tal capacity, devotion to truth and adaptation as teacher, 
under Rushton^s inspiration, to the demands of the day 
and the hour, I take very great pleasure in recommending 
all seekers after the truth — and I feel to add, the higher 
truths involved in science, philosophy and religion^ — to 
patronize his lectures, and furthermore, to purchase his 
book, for books, enlarging and enriching libraries, live 
long after the fingers that wrote them lie crumbling 

in dust. 

J. M. PEEBLES, M. D. 

Battle Creek, Mich. 



LECTURE I. 

THE BRAIN AND THE TRANCE STATE. 

Friends, in presenting to you so exalted a theme 
in a scientific manner it will be necessary, in the 
first place, for me to explain certain terms which 
go to constitute a scientific terminology. The first 
word that I want to define is " cell." The word 
cell, in its first form, gives you the idea of a sack. 
In the days of Harvey, the demonstrator of the 
circulation of the blood, a cell meant a sack, but in 
the present condition of the cellular hypothesis it 
does not mean exactly a sack, but a negative and a 
positive polarity of energy. You can see when you 
take the stopper out of your bath tub a whirling 
motion made by the water in passing into the pipe, 
that is vortex motion ; and the ratio of atomic 
motion is in proportion to the polarities of the 
energy. That will be very difiicult for some of you 
to understand, but if you closely observe the water 
you will see that some parts of it are moving at a 
higher ratio of speed than other parts, and in the 
formation of a cell some of the atoms being (atoms 
being vortex motion) moved at a higher ratio of 
vibration than others, and the combination of the 



10 The Brain and the Trance State. 

ratios of atomic motion constitute the molecular 
cell. Now that is technical, but it is necessary for 
you to understand what I mean when I say cell, for 
there are life cells, there are germ cells, and there 
are nerve cells, and this evening it is with nerve 
cells, for a few moments, that I want you to linger 
attentively. 

If I could present to you an actual medulla 
oblongata (a name given by the anatomists of the 
seventeenth century to an organ located at the 
summit of the spinal marrow) it might serve to 
illustrate this lesson. This organ is discharging the 
functions of nervous action which Plato attributed 
to the animal soul. Indeed its functioning capa- 
bility is to regulate, not to make, the action of the 
vital organs generally, and it is automatic ; that is 
to say, the nerve cells of the medulla oblongata act 
without consciousness. They are a co-ordinating 
power without consciousness. The life in the womb 
is an automatic life, and the building of the organic 
and nervous constitution is the work of the auto- 
matic processes of nervous action, and this auto- 
matic nervous action is co-ordinated by the soul 
entity, hence the soul is an automatic and a con- 
scious force through and in the physical body. 

The largest area of the soul's function is auto- 
matic. Plato's explanations made the animal soul 
— the automatic soul — a distinct, a mortal, soul, but 
at that period of time the philosophers made attri- 



The Brain and the Trance State. 11 

butes into entities. It is one soul, not seven. In 
Platonic idealism seven souls were represented. 
One soul out of the seven was the immortal soul 
called the nous to know, the " knowing soul," 

In the process of body building, according to the 
order of evolution, life appeared first in a simple 
cell, and cell succeeded cell until the most compli- 
cated organization was the result. Organ was 
added to organ, according to the surrounding con- 
ditions, changing conditions changed the needs and 
the function of the organization, but the soul could 
only express its powers according to the character 
of its organization. Before consciousness appeared 
there was a vegetable consciousness — a form of 
consciousness that did not know that it was plan- 
ning, designing, or adapting — there was no self- 
consciousness. The soul has two attributes of con- 
sciousness : First, the unconsious power to co-ordi- 
nate; second, the self-conscious power to co-ordinate 
— knowingly design and plan. 

The soul built the body under a long influence 
of an automatic heredity, a purely vegetable act of 
the soul. The soul proceeded to work on the auto- 
matic lines of life, following the idea of past form 
as far as possible. New conditions introducing 
change of structure and function. The function 
created the faculty according to the law of adap- 
tation. I am using the word "faculty" in its 
legal sense — power. It acquired a power, and that 



12 The Brain and the Trance State. 

power had, fn organic expression, an organ; hence 
the soul of man had to pass through the automatic 
stage before any self-consciousness was attained. 
It was a co-ordinating mechanical consciousness. 
This mechanical consciousness is the Life Function. 
You see it in its most elemental expression in the 
chemical action of atoms. The selective capability 
of oxygen in relation to hydrogen is as one to 
two ; that is, oxj^gen will polarize with hydrogen 
when there are two atoms of hydrogen and one of 
oxygen, and in no other way. That is mechanical 
selection, and it is elemental mind ; it is co-ordi- 
nating intelligence without consciousness. This 
elemental state the soul attained and expressed in 
its evolution through inferior organic forms, and 
built the medulla oblongata out of the necessities 
of its existence. All the faculties of mind have 
been built out of the necessities of existence. 

This automatic nervous relativity is retained in 
the animal organism for wonderful purposes. I 
will now illustrate where it comes in. If I could 
show you an optic nerve you would see a little 
white cord stretching from the back of the eye 
to the optic thalami. The optic thalami are two 
glands lying at the base of the brain, or nearly so, 
and about the size of a hazelnut in an adult. The 
constitution of the optic nerve is a wonderful con- 
stitution ; it is as wonderful as the eye. The eye 
of man will successfully interpret vibrations that 



The Brain and the Trance State. 13 

range between six hundred and six hundred and 
fifty millions per second. These words have no 
meaning to you. The amplitude and marvelous 
character of the vibrations. 

The vibratory theory of light is not correct, but 
the hammering processes of light, like little ham- 
mers, is. When you have your picture taken the 
light beats — hammers — upon the sensitive plate 
and dissolves certain chemical elements there. 
The eye has surrounding it cones as minute trum- 
pets, arranged with the little ends toward the 
center of the eye, and in round numbers there 
are six hundred millions of these little trumpets 
in the human eye. There are thirty-two thousand 
strands in the optic nerve, and the hammers of 
light cause molecular vibration in the optic nerve. 
The atoms of the nerve do not change places, but 
they vibrate, and the complicated vibration is sen- 
sation. 

Now, I want you to understand what I mean 
when I say " sensation." I mean the nervous 
mechanical action that an object has produced 
upon the apparatus of the eye. That vibration is 
continued to the thalami. The name, " thalami," 
is Latin, and means beds. There are two, and 
they are the beds of these vibrations. The larger 
cellular volume involved in the structure of the 
thalami give a storage battery, so to speak, for the 
continuity and the storing of sensational energy. 



14 The Brain and the Trance State. 

When a sensation has reached the thalami — sen- 
sations are all very complicated — that sensation 
passes to another gland (or glands) which has been 
named from its appearance. It is a stratified gland 
and is called the corpus striatum; but there are two, 
and the plural comes in the corpus striata, and here 
is the seat of consciousness. 

It is here that the soul stands at the door of sen- 
sation and perceives. All animals are conscious that 
possess corpus striata; without the corpus striata 
there is no consciousness. There is a little thread, 
a nerve, passing between the thalami and the stri- 
ata, and when this nerve is disconnected from the 
thalami you are asleep. If a physician could cut 
that nerve you would never awaken any more, your 
life would be one continuous sleep. All that hap- 
pens when you go to sleep is that the disconnection 
is made between the striata and the sensory tha- 
lami. You are cut oiF from the external world, 
and without sensation there is no consciousness. 

Consciousness is based on sensation. This is the 
reason why the soul was unconscious before it was 
embodied. This is the reason why you had no foetal 
consciousness. This is the reason why you cannot re- 
member your first year. The repeated hammerings 
of sensation were necessary to awaken conscious- 
ness. Sensations are awakening consciousness. This 
is why the soul is embodied. The soul would never 
have been conscious if it had not been embodied. 



The Brain and the Trance State. 15 

It was embodied for the purpose of relativity, and 
through relativity it becomes conscious. Your con- 
tact through sensation with nature is awakening 
knowledge, inducing knowledge. Before the soul 
can awaken to its knowledge it must have sensa- 
tion. There must, in other words, be something to 
butt against, something to strike it. There must 
be the ego and the non-ego before consciousness 
can be attained. There must be the polarities 
established, and these are established in the chem- 
ical relativities of the vital sphere. Then the com- 
plicated cells — nerves and cells — are the not-I; they 
are the thalami of the mind — the bed of the mind. 
The cerebral mass located in this region is com- 
posed merely of pigeon-holes, in which sensations, 
perceptions, and ideas are stored. 

I must define the word " idea." I mean by idea 
the sum of the diiference between two sensations. 
Without sensations there can be no idea ; with two 
sensations there is bound to be a thought, and that 
thought will be one of contrast in time and place. 
Time is intuitive ; place is intuitive. Time and place 
are original, elemental ideas ; they belong to the 
soul, and come into expression in the course of the 
mechanical evolution of its heredity, hence two 
things : you see a thing has length, breadth, and 
thickness ; a thing is in space. The infinite is not a 
thing because it has no parts, it has no surface, it has 
no center. The infinite is unthinkable because it is 



16 The Brain and the Trance State. 

not a thing. The mind can only think thought- 
forms, and there are two thought-forms of the same 
thing. Example ; The chair you sit upon is a 
thought-form ; the statue a thought-form. Form is 
the real, symbol the expression. You know that 
it is a chair because there is a chair like that chair 
in your mind, in your consciousness. The image 
of the chair is molecular, it is in the thalami, and 
the soul sees it in the thalami. The world you see, 
the Washington you see, the buildings you see, are 
not the buildings out there, but they are the pic- 
tures those buildings out there have made in the 
optic thalami, and the soul sees the world in the 
cells of the brain. All that you know is in the 
mind. Form is an attribute of consciousness, and 
time an attribute of consciousness. Well, then, 
having two excitements produced separate and 
distinct on the optic nerve they follow one another, 
and because they follow one another, and are 
necessarily fated to follow one another, the distance 
between them is time. 

The distance between two sensations is time, and 
their relationship to each other is place. Thus 
the original ideas of time and place spring out 
of the attribute of the soul's experiences in its 
automatic relationship in the past. The difference 
between two sensations constitutes the function of 
induction. 

Induction is that faculty of reason that distingu- 



The Brain and the Trance State. 17 

ishes differences ; it is comparative ; it is a classifier 
of sensations. 

Deduction is that power or attribute of reason 
which classifies ideas in relation to origin or cause. 
It traces the parentage of ideas and sensations. It 
identifies causes with their immediate and remote 
efi"ects, and effects to their real causes. It is the 
philosophical quality of the mind. 

Now that is all I need to explain in an elemental 
way this evening to cause you to rise to the 
comprehension of the constitution of mediumship 
in relation to what I will call the trance con- 
sciousness. 

An artificial production of sleep is entrancement. 
Any sleep that is induced by concentration is en- 
trancement. What is that? Concentration is the 
fixing of attention on as simple a sensation as pos- 
sible. Supposing you could so build a room that 
you could look at the point of a knitting needle 
and see nothing else in the room, that would be as 
simple a sensation as you could produce, and by 
steadily fixing the eye on that point there would 
be a continuity of the same vibration in the optic 
nerve, and the vibrations would run one after 
another and be alike, and the monotony, long con- 
tinued, cuts the connection between the thalami 
and corpus striata. I do not care how lymphatic a 
temperament may be, or how positive a will may 
be, the person will lapse into trance consciousness 



18 The Brain and the Trance State. 

by persistently continuing one sensation. Nature 
is so powerfully fortified in this relation that she 
has made provision in the nervous system to end 
sensation when the sensation becomes too domi- 
nant. Shakespeare did not understand the subject 
when he said that " The beetle you tread upon 
feels as much pain as when a giant dies." 

It does not. The constitution of the nervous 
system will only transmit a certain amount of ner- 
vous force called pain before you are landed in 
unconsciousness. When the pain reaches i ts maxi- 
mum you are no longer sensible of pain. Any 
interference with the cellular vibration of the 
thalami will cut off sensation. This is why ether, 
when it amalgamates with the hydrogen and the 
oxygen forming the blood corpuscle in the lungs, 
will so disturb normal cellular activity and suspend 
consciousness, that you may have a very painful 
surgical operation performed while the influence 
holds. Gases that readily amalgamate chemically 
with hydrogen and oxygen disturb the sensibility. 
This is why tobacco is so restful to the nervous 
man ; it soothes, because its chemical elements im- 
part nervous cellular activity. If you feed your 
child too much beyond the capacity of the pneumo- 
gastric nerve to cause digestion pain in the child's 
stomach will produce unconsciousness, and this is 
a fit, a rapid contraction, expansion, and explosion 
of nerve cells, and if the fit becomes continuous the 



The Brain and the Trance State. 19 

nerve cells and the brain cells burst and the child 
dies in convulsions. 

Then when you have suspended consciousness by 
concentration of the attention you are in a dream 
state. You are not perfectly separate, not abso- 
lutely separate from sensation, and that sensation 
provokes activity in the pigeon holes of the cere- 
brum, shall I say, and broken states of memory 
overlapping each other produce a dream conscious- 
ness. This is the dream consciousness in its most 
elemental form. But supposing that the cell, being 
an auric cell, that is, it is a vital cell and a mag- 
netic cell, constituting the dual molecule, and in 
sympathy — cells have mutual sympathies and 
mutual antagonisms — when an independent soul, 
either on the material plane of expression or on 
the spiritual plane of expression, influences the 
aura of a cell, it easily affects that cell in a state 
of sleep. It does not easily affect that cell in the 
waking state, because sensation dominates all the 
cells, but in the sleeping state the cells are readily 
influenced sympathetically by the auric sphere of 
the spirit, as I must explain. 

There is what has been called magnetism con- 
nected with the expression of every soul. Magnet- 
ism is a molecular force ; remember that. It is not 
spirit, for spirit is not molecular, but magnetism is 
molecular, and forms a link between matter and 
spirit. It is extremely sensitive to sympathy, it is 



' 20 The Brain and the Trance State. 

mechanically sympathetic, hence when a soul in 
form or a soul in spirit impinges upon the magnetic 
cell, it transfers its expression to that cell, and the 
most sensitive cell will express. So it gains an 
entrance to the consciousness — the trance consci- 
ousness of the soul. This consciousness is awakened 
by the excitement of the spirit through the aura of 
a cell, and this is the jointure, this is the plane 
of relativity between the controlling spirit and the 
soul of the medium. 

The soul of the medium is awakened to the 
thought, not sensationally awakened, but awakened 
to the trance consciousness, and carries that awake- 
ning to the medulla oblongata, where it gains an 
automatic expression. It is automatic talking now, 
but I am talking through the trance consciousness 
of the medium. The only way that I can get con- 
sciously at you is to articulate, and I borrow — under 
the constitution of nature I am capable of borrow- 
ing — an organization that I may become a con- 
scious environment to you, and awaken your con- 
sciousness to the thoughts that I am giving ex- 
pression to, and the truths that I am revealing 
to you. 

Thus there is a connection, shall I call it a tele- 
graphic connection, between the cells of the me- 
dulla oblongata and the corpus striata. There is a 
little strand in the nerve that is independent, and 
because that strand is independent of the thalami 



The Brain and the Trance State. 21 

trance mediumship is naturally possible. Without 
that strand there could be no spiritual communica- 
tion through the trance-consciousness. I will show 
you now where this nerve in another way operates, 
and you will readily recognize the function. Sup- 
posing you stood on the car track, and a car was 
rapidly coming toward you, and you were not con- 
scious of its coming, you were looking the other 
way and thinking on another subject, and a person 
on the sidewalk shouted to you. You immediately 
jumped. Now, this wonderful apparatus which 
enables you to jump out of the way of a street car 
before you have time to reflect on the cause of 
danger, the automatic action of sensation on the 
muscular apparatus, apart from the dictation of the 
mind, it follows that spirits can operate the muscles 
without calling into action the faculties of the 
mind. 

Suppose you were fighting and a blow was com- 
ing to your eye. The mind has no time to act. 
Before the mind can co-ordinate an action the eye- 
lid has closed. There is a strand in the optic nerve 
that passes directly to the medulla oblongata and 
co-ordinates muscular motion with motor nerves. 
You are indebted for this discovery to science. 
Modern physiological and anatomic science have 
demonstrated the existence of the apparatus through 
which spirits can communicate with mortals. Never 
permit it again to be said by ignorant opponents of 



22 The Brain and the Teance State. 

the phenomena of the trance-consciousness and 
the influence of spiritual power that such manifes- 
tations are not consistent with known physiological 
science. It is perfectly in harmony with physiolo- 
gical and anatomical science, demonstrated as a 
fact in organization every day in your medical 
colleges. 

You are indebted for this exposition to a spirit 
who, while in the form, was very critical, and much 
in doubt as to the genuineness of the physical 
phenomena of mediumship. Dr. Carpenter has 
furnished you these facts. He wrote his learned 
work on physiology many years ago, but I would 
recommend those of you who want to know more 
of unconscious cerebral action to read it, for it was 
he who created the phrase, " unconscious cerebra- 
tion," — unconscious thinking. 

Let me for a little while fall into the retrospec- 
tive consciousness. I can distinctly recollect, as I 
pass over the field of my retrospective memory 
the great sensation made in London when Edward 
Irving came there to deliver his marvelous sermons 
— we call them sermons. Irving was a few years 
older, and a friend of Thomas Carlyle, born in the 
same town in Scotland, Annan, in the vale of 
Annandale. I think, if I am not mistaken, it was 
about the year 1826 when Edward Irving com- 
menced his work in London. A large tabernacle 
was built for him and he spoke until 1835 in that 



The Brain and the Trance State. 23 

tabernacle, and spoke always in the trance state. 
Probably, I think, you will be able to find those 
sermons in your wonderful library here. Marvel- 
ously eloquent, he was controlled by spirits that 
had the intent of building the reformation of his 
work at that time. Later the subject excited great 
attention throughout Europe and America. 

The contributions of Braid to the study of Mes- 
merism led to the establishment of many broad 
principles, or, shall I say laws, regulating the in- 
ducement of the sleep. Between 1836 and 1850 a 
rapid development of knowledge was attained on 
the subject of entrancement. Braid demonstrated 
that it was attention, concentration, monotony. 

It pains me at this moment to have to contradict 
the French school of hypnotists who have declared 
that the hypnosis is produced by suggestion. The 
hypnosis is not produced by suggestion, but it is 
produced by monotony, hence a monotonous con- 
tinuity of tone will produce the quiet state. It 
was for this reason that the Druids intoned their 
speeches, their addresses, their sermons. It is for 
this reason that you have in the Koman Catholic 
Church intoning to-da3^ It has come down the 
ages from the Druidical period, because it induced 
sensitiveness in the early and primitive forms of 
Druidical mediumship. I could talk to you a great 
deal about that, but I want you to understand, and 
not to confound your attention, because of the 



24 The Brain and the Trance State. 

extension and horizon of the field of facts on which 
I can draw. When suggession is monotonous like 
this, " Go-to-sleep," acquiring the art of having 
but one tone in the voice, the monotony of tone 
and not suggestion produces the sleep; hence, 
music, rythmical music; I mean music, for exam- 
ple, like " Down upon the Suwanee River," " Home, 
Sweet Home," those sweet harmonious forms of 
musical expression are conducive to the modifica- 
tion of the action of conscious imagination, and 
readily cause a cultured organism to lapse into the 
trance state. But such music as " Pop goes the 
Weasel " dance music will have the opposite efi"ect, 
will rather tend to prevent entrancement than 
make it. 

As I have covered the physiological form of 
entrancement I will lift the inspiration a step higher 
and deal with the relativity of mind and soul, that 
is, with the connection between the mind and the 
soul. The mind is that portion of conscious expres- 
sion that organization has awakened in the soul. 
The mind is the conscious sum of all awakened 
sensations, and it is constitutional in its limitations. 
This mind stands only in a secondary way in rela- 
tivity with the spirit, the spirit becoming the not-I 
of the medium's consciousness. The spirit ap- 
proaches the molecular magnetic cell, and just as 
the wind will form a snow bank around the corner, 
so that cell takes the photograph of the thought 



The Brain and the Trance State. 25 

sent, and it is really an automatic photograph of a 
thought expressed on the aura of the cell, and the 
cell immediatel}'" utters it in two conditions : it 
utters it in the motor nerve centers and it utters 
it in the trance consciousness. There is not a 
thought that has ever been uttered in thirty-four 
years through this medium but what is in the 
soul's latent consciousness, and some condition will 
awaken that consciousness and throw it into the 
objective; it may not be in this life, but it will be 
in the order of the life which is to come. Then, 
any thought that is thrown does not generate a cell 
in the medium's cerebrum, that is, it does not go 
to the formation of his mind, because it does not 
get into the channel of the mind, but it gets into 
the automatic channel, and being there for so long 
a period of time the mediumship builds automatic 
cells, and the result is, after years of work, it be- 
comes automatic trance. 

Every thought that is awakened in consciousness 
creates for itself a brain cell, and you are creating 
brain cells every day. You are losing brain cells 
every day because your mind is forgetting, but 
your soul is not forgetting. Your mind is forgetting 
and you are forgetting and forgetting, and you are 
building, and if you can build thought cells you 
prolong life. 

The continuance of physical life largely depends 
upon your ability to build thought cells. If you 



26 The Brain and the Trance State. 

can continue the operation of building, if you can 
mentally keep growing, if you can make mind, you 
will live, but when you cannot make mind the body 
dies. Now, I want you to understand this truth, 
for it constitutes all that there is in all these ditt'er- 
ent systems of mental healing, the thought force 
creating new cells, evolutional capability making 
new cells. 

I had better explain, while here, that mysterious 
process of crystallization of tissue. Cut your linger 
and the wound will heal. Down through the capii 
laries rush the blood corpuscles and they come to 
the bleeding point, there they crystallize and build 
a bridge across the wound. Crystallization is the 
basis of life, of life form or expression, and this 
process touches the thought sphere, and when it 
comes under the domain of will, resolution, pur- 
pose, the blood takes on that purpose. Hov/ won- 
derfully the blood is affected by thought. How the 
young, sensitive maiden will blush. What is a 
blush? It is a magnetic disturbance of the blood 
corpuscles of the entire system. The pallor of fear 
changes the constitution of the blood corpuscles, 
and it aifects the brain and the whole vital system. 
A contented mind leads to health ; a discontented 
mind burns the candle of energy at both ends. 
Hence, draw the moral for yourselves, that to live 
long on earth, considering the conditions of your 



The Brain and the Trance State. 27 

heredity the development of brain cells is conducive 
to longevity. 

You will find if you study the records of biogra- 
phy and history that the men who have made their 
mark as, epoch men have been long lived. There 
are some few exceptions: Alexander, the Great, 
died at the age of 37; Burns, at the age of 37 ; Lord 
Byron, at the age of 37 ; Keats, at the age of 32 ; 
Shelley, about the same age; but Thomas Carlyle, 
Goethe, Humboldt, D'Israeli, Gladstone, Guizot, and 
the great statesmen of modern times, as a rule, 
have lived to be very old. The fires of ambition 
stimulate vitality. This is your lesson — to learn 
how to live. Thought is food. Mental inactivity 
is starvation ; worry is starvation. 

I have not touched the functional capability, the 
responding capability of mediumship in the trance 
state as to the interpretation of spiritual states of 
consciousness. The capacity to express in the 
trance consciousness is limited by the brain cells ; 
also by the automatic cells of the medulla oblon- 
gata. You will never find a powerful trance medi- 
umship with a small medulla oblongata, but you 
will find great capabilities of mediumship in a 
mental temperament with a long medulla oblon- 
gata. This was in Shakespeare, Goethe, Dante, 
Homer, all the great teachers of the world that have 
been subject to the flame and source of inspira- 
tion. The great agitators of the world have had a 



28 The Brain and the Trance State. 

large medulla oblongata, large lungs, and great 
bases of the brain. These men are the agitators; 
a tremendous magnetic force in the world, like 
Martin Luther, " the sledge hammer of the refor- 
mation ; " like John Wesley ; like some of the great 
agitators of the present time, both in religion and 
politics. Large lungs, large base of the brain, and 
a great abdominal cavity: there must be stomach 
power to build up the energy. Those of you who 
have to receive inspiration and do inspirational 
work should eat often, not a large amount at a time; 
the fires of nervous force must be kept up; the 
transmutation of psychic energy must be kept up. 
Food is force, and the constitution of man can trans- 
mute unconscious force, that is, force that is not 
allied with consciousness into force that is allied 
with consciousness. There is an evolution or incar- 
nation of force from the vegetable to the animal, 
and from the animal on to man. 

The magnetism of the universe, the economy of 
its forces, the display of its energies, are ever 
charming to the mind of the thoughtful. You are 
placed in relationship with the spiritual world on 
many lines. Trance mediumship is not the only 
form in which this automatic cell expresses itself. 
It expresses itself under a large medulla ofelong.ata 
in a physical form of mediumship; the vibratory 
force extends upon the magnetic atmosphere and 
moves bodies; magnetism passes from the magnetic 



The Brain and the Trance State. 29 

cell into the atmospheric cell, and you get the rap; 
it passes from an auric cell into an etheric cell, and 
it becomes materialization — all difficult experi- 
ments to make, and are experiments at all times. 
Man sometimes blunders upon the conditions for 
making it possible for spirits to manifest, but ere 
long the science of mediumship will be better un- 
derstood, and the phenomena more reliable, and 
the gross charge of fraud not so often made among 
intelligent students of the occult. You are rising 
to the knowledge. Inspiration is transforming your 
civilization. You think that your statesmen, ora- 
tors, and divines are molding your culture; they 
are instruments in the hands of a gigantic power. 
I will call it Infinite Power, for what is the universe 
but an expression? What is history but an expres- 
sion ? What is a man soul but an expression, a 
great spiritual, social combination? Man cannot 
live alone. His isolation is imperfect. He stands in 
the sphere of a mind; a mind that has thrown itself 
out of the sphere of personality on to a sphere, I 
will call it an atmosphere, and this providential 
force is working out in nature realized ideas from 
the spiritual plane. And as I look down the horo- 
scope of time I see in the vista of the future the 
coming glorification of your race. Man must yet be 
happy on the plane of Time; life must be extended 
in duration that man may accomplish the full field 
of his expression. It is man that is behind, and 



30 The Brain and the Trance State. 

he is under pressure; your civilization is under 
pressure; your art is under pressure. Look at your 
schools to-day, at the pressure ; look at your com- 
merce ; look at your literature ; look at every 
avenue of thought and life, and there is an intensity 
of pressure. The spiritual world makes polarities 
of men, and makes polarities of companies of men 
and of nations — nations have a collective magne- 
tism — that is destining the career of a higher and 
more progressive civilization. 

Behold the rise of the Japanese, in a generation 
they have shot up into the first plane of national 
life. An ancient thought, an ancient cult, dressed 
in the modern terminology of progressive thought, 
and destined to wield a mighty influence on Asiatic 
civilization. And I see on the shadows of time the 
fading away of effete nationalities, a dissolution of 
impotent states, families and beliefs; and forward 
the centuries awaiting your gaze is filled with un- 
thinkable possibilities, and man and inspiration are 
working in the domain of the small. It is in the 
world of the insensible, the subsensible, where 
science is at work, down in the elements of nature, 
and the mighty forces of nature — the giants of the 
universe — are being commanded by little children. 
You are destined to immortality, and your first look 
at your consciousness is an amazing look, but this 
consciousness will rise from stage to stage, and 
overlap and overlap as you rise in the sphere of 



The Brain and the Trance State. 31 

being, and this overlapping is for the benefit of 
humanity, for the benefit of the soul's advance, for 
the unfoldment of the soul's consciousness. And 
what a consciousness ! An infinite world visible 
to the eye of the soul, the totality of all experience 
in it, the vitality of all thought centered in one 
great eternal Infinite Eye — Consciousness — cover- 
ing all that has been, that is, and that will be, 
life without end. This is the power of nature and 
sovereign dignity of man, reason being but the 
dawn of the conscious day, the beginning of the 
light, the opening of the gate to the view of the 
wonderous greatness of the subjective self. 



LECTURE II. 

MIND. 

When we met you, friends, on the last occasion 
in this place, we sketched to you the physiological 
conditions of mediumship as presented in the auto- 
matic and trance states of consciousness, and with 
what was" then said riveted in your consciousness 
we are at a point where we can proceed to deal 
with the great facts that lie in the realm of mind 
itself. The task this evening will be to define the 
mind. 

I do not know of any one word that is more in 
need of a definition than the word " mind." It has 
been and it is used by difi"erent thinkers in a very 
loose manner. 

Mind is conscious operation. The activity of 
consciousness in any mode or personality can be 
correctly called mind. I can correctly, in a spirit- 
ual consciousness, speak of my mind. The word 
in that relation covers the operations of my con- 
sciousness on any given thought: sensations, per- 
ceptions, or ideations. Any presentation to the 
eye of consciousness is mind. Mind is function. 
The word function stands for what a thing does. 



Mind. 33 

The function of a plow is to plow ; the function of 
the tongue is to articulate ; the function of the 
lungs is to breathe ; the function of the heart is 
to regulate the circulation of the blood ; the func- 
tion of the brain is to create modes of coherent 
consecutive expression of the things in conscious- 
ness. Mind is not consciousness, but mind is the 
function of consciousness, and it is the measure of 
the unfoldment of consciousness. 

There are two kinds of mind ; there is unconscious 
mind and conscious mind. Unconscious mind does 
not mean what I have stated mind strictly to mean, 
but unconscious mind means those operations of 
selective and rejective states apart from knowing. 
The whole of the function of the medulla oblon- 
gata constitutes unconscious mind. 

Unconscious mind was the animal soul of Plato. 
In Plato's speculations you are introduced to the 
animal soul, a terminology that once suited meta- 
physical thinkers, but science requires a better term 
than that, and until a better term is created I will 
content myself with calling this mind a mechanical 
mind. It performs very important functions in the 
system of animal economy ; it carries on the chem- 
ical processes of body building. The soul builds 
the body under the conditions of the environment, 
the environment always being the modifier of the 
mechanical mind in the processes of body building. 
The chemical activities controlled by the mechani- 



34 Mind. 

cal mind enter into the structural development of 
the body, and, at the same time, the dual act of 
body building goes on, for there is a mechanical 
selective and co-ordinating spiritual mind parallel 
to and running consequentially with the bodily co- 
ordinating mind — two minds and two bodies in 
perfect polarity, as true a polarity as the molecules 
constituting water ; a perfect harmonic relationship, 
so that what is present in one mind is present in 
the other without consciousness. The dual charac- 
ter of mind should never be lost sight of in the 
scientific study of biological evolution. Science 
will never succeed in describing the building of 
organic body without taking into consideration the 
dual nature of energy. Scientific speculation is 
reaching out in this direction, and it is beginning 
to be a necessary speculation, in the hypothesis of 
chemical combinations, to invent a second Ether. 

This second ether of chemical science is a non- 
polarized ether. In a few years it will advance to 
the dignity of a definite hypothesis, and it will be 
postulated that it is atomic like ether. To-day the 
scientific mind is working in the ethers — marvelous 
subjects — more marvelous even than the pheno- 
mena of Modern Spiritualism, reaching out in the 
domain of mind and realizing to conscious mind 
how unstable are the so-called material phenomena 
of nature. 

Within the past decade matter has had to be de- 



Mind. 35 

fined over again. The old doctrine of Thales, handed 
down from generation to generation to the present 
time, will have to be given up. Modern chemistry 
has revolutionized old thought, and the X ray has 
changed man's definition of the constitution of mat- 
ter. The operations of this unconscious mechanical 
process, its capacities for expression, are more pro- 
found, indeed greater than the conscious mind, for 
what could conscious mind do in constructing the 
mechanism of an eye; what could conscious mind 
do in constructing the powers and the attributes of 
a blood corpuscle — marvelous in nature and constitu- 
tion; what could conscious mind do in constructing 
this wonderful piece of mechanism called the body 
of man ? What mind can you find that is conscious 
in nature that could produce for you, by any creative 
method of its own, such a thing as a white lily, a 
flower, a tree ? The marvelous capabilities of the 
soul in stages in which consciousness is not reached, 
for verily the body of man is the expression ot the 
soul, the soul is the master workman and works 
without design, works without plan, works without 
knowing, but works with intelligence ; and this 
unconscious intelligence manifested in nature is 
constantly a surprise and constantly a marvel to 
intellectual consciousness. At another time I will 
speak to you more fully of unconscious mentality, 
both in the individual and cosmic sense, but this 
evening I want my remarks to be an entire defini- 



36 Mind. 

tioii of conscious mental man. And we will begin 
with the operation of mind itself. 

There is no mind until there is a sense. Man is 
endowed with live senses — five senses which have 
advanced into the area of sense, perfect categorical 
senses — not perfect, but perfect in their category. 
The sense of feeling is an elemental feeling. I 
define feeling to conscious relationship to what is 
passing and acting upon bodily sensibility. Bodily 
sensibility is sensory nerve vibration. 

There are sensory nerves and motor nerves. A 
motor nerve moves muscles ; a sensory nerve trans- 
mits vibration both ways — to the mind of consci- 
ousness and from the mind of consciousness. See- 
ing is sensation; smelling is sensation. Things 
perceived are in the mind; things in themselves 
are out there, in nature. There is the mental thing, 
the thing known and the thing objective. There 
is the thing in the eye and there is the thing not 
in the eye. Example : The chair you sit upon is 
an object, a thing. This is the correct word, 
" thing," and the correct use of the word thing. 
But the chair you sit upon also exists in the 
mind, and that mind-chair is not a thing in the 
sense in which the chair you really sit upon is 
a thing, because the chair you sit upon is in 
the plane of dimension, and the thought -thing 
in consciousness is not in the plane of dimen- 
sion, it is in the plane of the non-dimensional. 



Mind. 37 

In other words, the chair is in extension, the 
mental chair is in thought, and it would be cor- 
rect to say that the chair was a thought-thing in 
consciousness, and that the word "chair" is the 
name of a thing. All words are names of things, 
and standing in this sense, in the large use of the 
word " thing," all the photographs and representa- 
tions in consciousness of the supposed form and 
relationships of the general things, the verification, 
the reality, the correctness of the photograph of 
the thought-thing, and the objective thing cannot 
be demonstrated by consciousness. I want j'^ou 
thoroughly to realize this idea : that the picture 
you have in consciousness of your friend may be 
a correct or it may not be a correct picture of your 
friend, but the correctness of your picture will be 
determined by the correction of your sense. With 
poor eyes you cannot see correctly, and the thought- 
thing is not correct; the details are not in the 
thought - thing while they are in the objective 
thing. So here we come to the first condition of 
consciousness, that there are things of which the 
mind can become conscious, and the process or 
manner is the process through the constitution of 
the mind. 

Sensations have characteristics, and these will 
have to be defined. An objective thing— the thing 
outside of me, the house, the horse, the railroad, 
the world, the not-I — that which is outside of me 



38 Mind. 

I am forming conceptions of, but none of these 
conceptions are absolutely correct because of the 
incorrect vibration created by them on the sense 
apparatus. Everything outside of me has length, 
breadth, and thickness. A shadow is not a " thing." 
It has length and breadth, but no thickness. It has 
a surface and is represented in the mind by a 
thought-thing in two dimensions of space. The 
real thing is in three dimensions of space — length, 
breadth and thickness. That is form, the definition 
of absolute form; and it is the definition of space, 
the relation or the relationships of the attributes 
of extension, and therefore must have a correspond- 
ing definition in perception. 

The soul either knew Form eternally or acquired 
it by evolution. It is certainly an intuition. What 
do I mean by "intuition?" I mean that the 
thought of extension must have been in the soul 
before sensation of a thing could be possible, and, 
a 'priori^ sensation of that soul must be postulated 
in order to explain the intuition of space. I think 
Kant was correctly inspired when he insisted upon 
space being an innate idea. By " innate " and 
"intuition" I mean the same thing. That which 
has not been acquired in consciousness through the 
avenues of sense is intuition ; that which has not 
been acquired through the senses is intuition ; that 
which the soul throws into the mind, independent 
of the sense, is intuition. 



Mind. 39 

Intuition is not inspiration, but it is the soul 
throwing into the mind what it has had expressed 
in it by some previous relativity, and the soul, when 
it attains the power of expression, the conscious 
perception of space, has attained personality, but 
not before. Without perception of space in which 
to put the not-I there can be no personality. Un- 
conscious mind is not personal, because it does not 
cognize the not-I ; it does not cognize at all. An 
unconscious mind sometimes can be covered by 
what has been termed instinct. But instinct is so 
meaningless. 

I can remember as I go back to my retrospect, a 
great debate between an old friend of mine — Lord 
Brougham — and Sir David Brewster, on the mean- 
ing of the word instinct. I agree with neither. 
But I define instinct to be mind that acts without 
perception, and continues to act without progres- 
sion. 

I will now speak of some of the instincts of the 
mind. In the philosophy of Plato he called them 
souls. Plato was in error; he called attributes 
entities. That was his trouble ; a matter of errone- 
ous terminology. There was the " animal soul," 
there was the " soul of generation " — the amative 
soul was the soul of generation — the " soul of 
pubertj'^,-' the "soul of digestion," the "soul of 
moral emotion," the " intellectual soul " that ex- 
pressed the logos of consciousness. 



40 Mind. 

The first instinct in the constitution of the mind 
is that first produced in the order of evolutionary- 
incarnation of the soul, the instinct of reproduc- 
tion. The mind cell of reproduction was the first 
vital cell. Coupled with that followed the protec- 
tion of that which instinct had produced in its 
most elemental form. Amativeness is chemical ad- 
hesiveness in the processes of crystallization in the 
natural world, and in the processes of the building- 
up of the dual man-body in expansion and the 
body in thought ; the aflinity between the two is 
amativeness, the combination reproduction, and, 
following in the evolution of instinct, immediately 
come the instinct of motherhood, mother love; and 
mother love brought a chain of instincts — comba- 
tiveness, destructiveness, secretiveness, and the 
sentiment of home — location ; and then followed 
the instinct of personal rule: dominion, courage, 
■ fear, companionship ; slowly built up the soul, 
slowly through millions of ages perfecting the 
instincts of animal nature. Animal nature is as 
divine as spiritual nature. The function of animal 
reproduction is as divine as a soul being born into 
spirit life. To be born into the earth life is as pure, 
and as beautiful, and as grand a natural pheno- 
menon as the ascent of an archangel to the con- 
scious states of celestial spheres. There is nothing 
vile, low, corrupt in nature. Natiire^hasjio morals, 
y I and morals cannot be applied to nature. Nature 




Mind. 41 

has no conduct. The laws of nature are the laws 
of the operation of the infinite. I mean by " law," 
habit; I do not mean bylaw power, but I mean 
the manner in which power acts. The power of 
the govornment of the United States is expressed 
by law ; the power of nature, likewise, is expressed 
in law. A sovereign power is law. The laws of a 
State express the manner in which the sovereign 
power of the people acts, so do not understand me 
when I say the laws of nature that I mean the 
powers of nature ; I simply mean the manner in 
which the power of nature works; and when I say 
" the laws of mind," I do not mean the powers of 
mind, but the manner in which the powers of the 
mind act. 

The constitution of the mind is not law, but it 
is the process of organic functions that constitute 
mind, and the orderly compromises between these 
functions constitute law — the manner of the action 
of the mind. 

Animal propensities, animal feelings and passions 
in men are there because they have been planted 
by the reminiscent past on an unconscious mental 
sphere. The soul traveled up toward the expres- 
sion of consciousness. The animal powers in the 
mind are tendencies, not thought-making faculties, 
but tendencies. To change the form of expression, 
they are like the wind blowing the mind, the con- 
sciousness, toward the evidences of perception in 



42 Mind. 

certain directions, making an exhileration, a super- 
lative excitement of perception ; the superlative 
excitement coming from the awakening of the 
reminiscent. 

Sexual excitement is the result of the soul con- 
sciously coming to the memory of a past creative 
action. It is the birth of a thought, and in the 
spiritual mind the birth of a thought will be the 
amative joy of that life, and the expansion of the 
soul is always an expression of the soul-force of 
past relativities, and the rest of the propensities 
centering around this central activity of function 
to exalt it; and what follows in what I may call 
moral sentiment and the esthetic powers of the 
mind are evolutions out of this same propensity. 
That is to say, that all the blossoms of the mind 
originate in amativeness at the beginning of the de- 
velopment of the soul, the potentiality of the soul, 
and the influence on tlie moral sense of the rela- 
tionship, for you will readily comprehend me when 
I say that the moral faculty is the faculty recog- 
nizing truth and justice. 

Then what is truth ? Truth is the conscious veri- 
fication of the perception. When the soul sanctions 
the likeness of the thought-thing and the external 
or objective, w^hen there is a perfect recognition, 
that is the birth-place of the conception of truth. 
It is the verification of two photographs. It is a 
dual expression. It is conception ; the spiritual 



Mind. 43 

amativeness of that instinctive consciousness rising 
to know itself. Moral adhesiveness is that resolu- 
tion or power to hold conviction — decision. This 
power is innate. Some souls, due to the conditions 
of heredity and circumstance, are unable to hold 
the hand of moral adhesiveness — intellect enough 
to know the right, instinctive power enough to 
strive for, but no adhesiveness to hold it. It is a 
power — I will call it the moral sticking plaster — 
that enables the integrity of conviction to be main- 
tained in the resolution of the mind. Some souls, 
in the expression of mentality in body, are weak 
here, and this leads to a failure to keep the law of 
the social body and the moral law of private con- 
tract. It is the mother of lies, hypocrisy and mis- 
representation, hence, not a perfect mind; amoral 
blindness or corresponding condition to sensational 
blindness, then the moral perception and concep- 
tion are tendencies that blow upon the intellect 
always in the same direction. They are instinctive, 
that is, they are innate ; they are the intuitions of 
the soul — the soul expressing its powers in con- 
sciousness. 

Perception must now be defined. All percep- 
tions are acts of mind and follow two sensations. 
With one sensation only there could not be per- 
ception. Sensations are so complicated that it 
would be impossible for you to produce one sen- 
sation, so many things would appear in that sensa- 



44 Mind. 

tion. When you look at one another you see in 
the background of the picture so many details 
which never are really identified by consciousness, 
but which are in the sensation. It would be, there- 
fore, impossible to get a pure unit of sense. If 
you could, there would be no perception. Con- 
sciousness would not be made. There must be at 
least two vibrations, and then the mind distin- 
guishes the difference. The difference between two 
sensations is a thought. First, it is a comparative 
thought. When you have the paving stone as a sen- 
sensation and the wheelbarrow as another sensation, 
the mind distinguishes the difference between the 
wheelbarrow and the paving stone by comparison 
of the attributes of each. This power to compare 
is also intuitive, coming out of the heredity of 
past conditions ; and this, in the science of logic, 
is called induction. When a man is comparing the 
different things on the face of the earth with each 
other he is working inductively. When a man is 
working among the phenomena of nature and per- 
ceives that from the seed he plants a vegetable 
comes, he calls into existence the faculty of com- 
parison and another, and that other is the recog- 
nition of the conception that the seed is the cause, 
that the vegetable is the consequence of the power 
of the seed, and this is deduction. This is also an 
intuition coming from the soul awakened by previ- 
ous relativities of the soul, and in this expression 



Mind. 45 

coming up the ladder of evolution to a greater 
expression, due to the favorable conditions of the 
environment, a human environment giving a higher 
expression to mind. 

With the activity of induction and deduction you 
have reason. When induction is diseased, there is 
a loss of the conception of personality. If you 
will study the insane in your lunatic asylums you 
will find a confusion and contradiction of person- 
ality in the diseased, and this is a loss of personal 
consciousness in expression. Should the patient 
be restored to mental health there may be or there 
may not be a remembrance of the confusion of 
the personality in the insane state. When reason 
is thoroughly dethroned, it is the disease of the 
powers of deduction and induction. 

The right use of the faculties of the mind is the 
science of logic. Memory covers ideas, percep- 
tions, and sensations. The soul has intuitions of 
form covering relationship. The mathematical con- 
ception of time, of place, of condition, of number, 
in time and place, color, solidity, are intuitive 
ideas. 

My friend, David Hume, the Scottish metaphy- 
sician, said — still says — that there is no criterion 
in the human reason by which the thought of 
solidity can be demonstrated. Probably there will 
never be a time until science is perfectly victorious 
over the laws of matter to demonstrate Hume's 



46 Mind. 

postulate, but the intellectual faculties thus con- 
stituted are under processes of evolution, and still 
the mind is incomplete in the description we have 
given of it, for there are several faculties in the 
mind yet to be described. 

I define the inventive faculty to be conception, 
not perceptiou. I shall be contradicted by some 
thinkers in both spheres, but when I have ex- 
plained I think you will agree with me. A process 
of induction can only bring into the conclusion 
what is in a sense ; that is, I cannot logically come 
to a correct conclusion and put more into my con- 
clusion than the facts contain. If I do so I am 
reasoning illogically. But invention is something 
not in the facts. It would not be invention if it lay 
in the perceived facts. It is a creation of the mind, 
not a creation of the soul, but thrown from the 
soul sometimes into the mind, and in this sense it 
is an intuition. 

Sometimes I would define invention to be intui- 
tion, and sometimes, under some circumstances 
and conditions, I would define it to be this : There 
is a soul out there on the spiritual plane with a 
complex thought ; telepathically that soul can ex- 
press it to another soul, and that soul can tele- 
pathically express it too through an accentuated 
mental state, then it is invention by inspiration. 
Sometimes, as it were, the lungs of the mind can 
inhale from the external mind realm. Just as there 



Mind. 47 

is a material world there is a mind world, and the 
mind's consciousness can enter into rapport with 
the mental realm and become inspired. An in- 
spiration can be invention, for the mind is subject 
to intuition and subject to inspiration. Thus the 
conceptions of mind are so varied and so complex 
that the order of mental progress is due to the 
enlargement of the inhalation of concepts from 
soul consciousness that is objective to the personal 
consciousness. I want you to see this idea because 
some men have failed to see its power and its 
significance in the operations of intellect, and are 
at this day trying to develop a philosophy that shall 
ascribe all progress to intuition and none to inspira- 
tion. To deny inspiration is absurd. The different 
philosophies and sects that are trying to substitute 
the innate contents of a subjective consciousness for 
inspiration fail to meet the problems of intelligence 
and genius. There is invention by inspiration; 
there is the development of thought by inspiration, 
transcending experience, learning and organic capa- 
bility, and there is invention by intuition. In such 
conditions as are presented the soul, which is the 
maker of its body, can reveal to a degree itself, 
and then it is the inventor, but as soul-life is co- 
operative and spheral the soul enters into magnetic 
relationships and becomes inspired ; that is, it 
awakens to new conceptions of truth. But as the 
finite rolls before the limited consciousness the in- 



48 Mind. 

finite — that is, the total knowledge, the cosmic intel- 
ligence of nature itself — becomes automatic inspira- 
tion, and it is correct to say that nature, as a whole, 
covered by your sensation, can inspire you. What 
an inspiration man can draw from the forms of 
nature, due to the exaltation of the faculties of 
imagination — the esthetic faculties, the conceptive 
faculties, dominating the power of original taste — 
the perception of the sublime. I wish you would 
study a book written by an old friend of mine, 
a man whose name will ever be endeared to the 
patriotic life of America — Edmund Burke; and 
the book I want you to read is his work on the 
"Sublime and Beautiful." It is an exposition of 
the conception and the perception of the laws 
thereof of the beautiful ; and such works have to 
man an infinite value, much neglected by the 
shallow metaphysics and metaphysicians of the 
times in which you live. 

Sterling thinkers, inspired men, you have had, 
and because they are only for the few they are 
neglected, and in the frivolous, immoral and excit- 
ing literature of common life lost in the great 
rubbish of your day. I want to see harder reading. 
I want you to see the great thinkers of the world, 
for what is the use of dealing with lesser lights 
when a view of the great light would obviate the 
necessity and awaken within you the great ideas 
pf the thought. If you want idealism, and to 



Mind. 49 

know what it means, go to Fichte, and not to the 
diluted streams — minds that have not understood 
Fichte. If you want Anglican idealism, go to 
Berkeley ; if you want sensationlism go to Leckey ; 
if you want Scottish sensationlism, go to Hume ; if 
you want philosophical phenomenalism, go to 
Herbert Spencer ; if you want a philosophical 
phenomenalist, in its best logical expression, go to 
John Stuart Mill, where the best invention, the 
highest expression in philosophy, can be found. If 
you want a historical idealism, go to the Vedas. 
If you want the earliest spiritual poetry, go to 
India and the Egyptian Book of the Dead. If you 
want a Grecian Idealism, go to the poets of Greece. 
If you want the romance of pastoral poetry and 
imagination, go to the brilliant age of Augustus. 
If you want the monotheism of the ecclesiastical 
dominating civilization, go to the Mohammedan 
thinkers and poets. 

Do not let your mind live in one thought, in 
one cult. He who knows only his own cult knows 
but little. My old friend Brougham used to say 
to me : " I study the case of my opponent, and 
when I know it better than he knows it, I can 
refute him." If you want to refute error you must 
know it better than those who believe it; you must 
understand the opposite side of the case. If you 
are inclined to idealism, know thoroughly the phil- 
osophy of materialism; if you are a materialist. 



50 Mind. 

know thoroughly the doctrines of idealism. What 
are philosophies but scaffolding ? They are not the 
truth, but they are the scaffolding by which you 
mount to truth. Love truth and yonr convictions, 
but hold the mind ready for the truth of to-morrow. 
What a dreadful thing to shut out truth from the 
mind by a dominating dogma. 

Intellectual freedom is an intellect with its door 
open to welcome the stranger. The vagrant thought 
may bring a truth to you. The lowest element 
in consciousness may stimulate and bring an arch- 
angel down. Look everywhere. Everyone should 
be free, but the recognition of truth should be as 
emphatic as are the laws of God. The soul will 
know truth when it meets it. The soul recognizes 
itself on the planes of eternal progress. The mind 
is enlarging. Consciousness is mystery, and it is 
lying close to the mystery of the infinite. Con- 
sciousness is the chariot of the logos. Conscious- 
ness is deity in expression. 

These are the teachings that I want to leave with 
you, and with the deliberation and the power 1 
have had at my command I have come into the 
precincts of your reason, and I want you to value 
the thought at its worth, and in days to come to 
meditate upon these things. I want you to be 
useful to the human race by teaching other souls 
how to express. When you teach you instruct 
another. I am instructing you through the avenues 



Mind. 51 

of sense. You are like the Dog Star, looking upon 
two worlds, the world of Osiris and the world of 
Isis. You are looking into the one soul in dual 
expression, male and female. Work on then, for 
you are naturally immortal. You can vacate form 
expression, you can enter into the spiritual expres- 
sion, but up the ladder of infinite time you have 
to walk, and we are going on together; hand in 
hand we climb the Alpine hills, and from the snowy 
summits of exalted progress we shout to the world 
below, " Excelsior." 



LECTURE III. 

THE SPIRIT MAN IN RELATION TO THE PSYCHIC MAN. 

The Spirit Man in Relation to the Psychic Man is 
the subject for my discussion this evening. As you 
are already aware, my friends, the " my " covers 
a band of spirits. My effort has been to elucidate 
that you may understand some of the elementary 
laws of human mentality and spiritual existence, 
and to some of you the didactic method has been 
very hard and severe. The struggle to attain to 
the conception of a new truth is a mental exercise 
that will redound to the intellectual progress of 
the person now and in future days. Never fear 
grappling with the difficult in thought. Repeat 
the thought and repeat it, and by familiarity with 
the thought the mind will grow. A difficult sub- 
ject becomes easy by repetition. 

By the term " spirit man " I mean the man built 
after the death of the body, for verily the continued 
personal consciousness is of the nature and con- 
stitution of man. Man never vacates heredity. 
That which has been contributed in the develop- 
ment of the whole Ego is never lost. Nothing 
perishes in the material world — I mean, the sub- 

S2 



Spirit Man in Relation to Psychic Man. 53 

stance itself remains ; and in the thought-sphere 
nothing fails, all conceptions last, all experiences 
maintain their relativity to the spirit man. 

And, first of all, I will try to give you an idea 
of the meaning of the word " form " in its objective 
and in relation to its subjective state. There is a 
faculty in consciousness perception that covers the 
sensation of form, but when form is reduced to its 
last analysis, it is purely a metaphysical concept. 

There are in the mind what I will call intuitive 
or original ideas of form; this form being an 
intuitive or a subjective perception is a law of 
consciousness. The soul will never vacate the per- 
ception of form ; it will always identify sensation 
with form, even in the highest expressions of clair- 
voyance. It will never vacate the idea of a thing 
— a thing abstract and thing as a subjective intui- 
tion of consciousness. The idea of thing is not 
acquired by experiences, but it is something more 
profound and original than any experience. It is 
one of the pillars in the scaffold of experience, 
hence, it would be absurd to talk to you about a 
world of consciousness without form ; it would be 
absolutely impossible for you to form the remotest 
conception of the world of existence and pheno- 
mena without existence and phenomena taking 
form ; hence, the spirit man has his form ; hence, 
the spiritual world is made up of extension and 
form in the concept of the spirit. To suppose the 



54 Spirit Man in Eelation to Psychic Man. 

contrary is to suppose that the spirit man has no 
form; but to suppose that the spiritual world and 
its phenomena had no form is to suppose that 
which in itself is absolutely inconceivable and 
therefore absurd. The only idea that it would be 
possible for you to take, or that I can possibly give 
you, is in the description of the fact of the spirit 
man, that he has form, a spirit form contradistin- 
guishing him from a denizen of the material state. 
In the abstract speculations of the ancient poets 
and philosophers the great mistake was made of 
asserting too wide a division between the constitu- 
tion of spirit and the constitution of matter. Those 
poets and philosophers forgot that these two modes 
of being stood to each other in vibratory relativity. 
and that there was no void, no chasm, between mat- 
ter and spirit. Sectional hatred grew out of the 
antagonism. He who held the body of the man to 
be the real existence was looked upon with con- 
tempt and pronounced a sensualist, a materialist — 
terms of contempt in those days, and that con- 
tempt, more or less, has come floating down the 
ages, and the intellectual man even to-day speaks 
of the " materialistic tendencies of mind," and 
the " groveling conditions of the mind," " a mind 
unable to comprehend the beautiful spiritual laws 
and conditions," and '■'■ a mind clouded with material 
conditions," as if matter was in some condition of 
condemnation; as if matter was some obnoxious 



Spirit Man in Relation to Psychic Man. 55 

expression of Satanic power in the universe. In- 
deed, there was a time when it was so believed, for 
did not the speculations of Pythagoras so teach ? 
Did not a school in India so teach long before the 
days of Pythagoras ? And did not he pick up that 
thought in Egypt and did not he carry it into Italy ? 
The thought came from India. The thought was 
this : That existence was pure divine essence ; that 
existence was pure soul ; and that in the course of 
the happy existences in the multiplex consciousness 
of divinity quarrels arose, and this beautiful sphere, 
this divine elj^^sium became filled with contending 
divinities. The contending divinities met on the 
field of heaven and fought. This idea John Milton 
takes up in " Paradise Lost : " not a Christian epic 
by any means, but an ancient pagan epic. 

There is nothing mean, there is nothing disgust- 
ing, there is nothing unholy, there is nothing con- 
temptible about matter. All that can possibly be 
said about matter is that it may be dirt. And what 
is dirt ? Why just matter in the wrong place, that 
is all. And what is evil ? Why just a thought and 
an action at the wrong place, that is all. So that 
relativity is the determining factor of good and 
evil, and there is nothing in this wide universe that 
is, in itself perceived, either good or evil 

A man may have a gold watch and it may keep 
bad time ; it is a bad watch. A man may have a 
nickle-silver watch, and it may keep good time ; 



56 Spirit Man in Relation to Psychic Man. 

it is a good watch. That is a good thing that does 
well the work for which it was designed. Good 
and evil are relative states of action, of pleasure 
and of pain. 

In the past man has deemed that for good which 
gave him pleasure, and that to be evil which gave 
him pain. Well, then, let us dismiss that subject, 
and nevermore attempt to cast a stigma on any- 
body who happens to have the courage to say that 
there is actually a material world ; that it is not all 
mind, but that there is something outside of mind 
that we call matter. Verily, then, in this material 
world there is an interior spirit. The great universe 
in which you live is a body, and the spirit moves 
within it. 

Let us pause one moment while we think of the 
retrospect. During the eighteenth century, when 
man was seeking facts with which to prop up the 
tottering theology of the time, what did he do ? 
Bishop Butler and Paley went to nature to seek 
for an argument to establish the great fact of the 
existence of an independent, absolute, creative force 
— God. Now let us look at the distinction between 
the statement that I made and the statements made 
by these learned men in the eighteenth century. 

Here you have a piano. Did the piano make 
itself, or did the piano design itself? The answer 
will be emphatically no. A man, you say, designed 
the piano, a man made it, a man sold it, a man 



Spirit Man in Relation to Psychic Man. 57 

carried it. Then there was a piano in the man's 
mind before this piano was made, and after the 
model thought of in that mind that pianot stood 
forth. This was an eighteenth century speculation 
about spirit and matter, and spirit designing and 
thought contrivance in relation to matter. The 
statement I made was this: That there is a spirit 
in nature, and the spirit in nature unfolds the world. 
Then we would have a postulate like this : That 
the piano was made by a spirit that is in it, and 
the spirit of the piano is the real piano and ex- 
presses itself; the thought-piano that was in the 
mind of the thinker was the cause piano. That is 
one of the phases of the creative cause piano, and 
standing forth the piano comes by labor ; in nature 
it comes by evolution, which is the manner of the 
labor. 

In the eighteenth century the ideal stood outside 
of the universe, as if God, the creator, with leath- 
ern apron on, rolled up His shirt sleeves and went 
to work on His great infinite bench and rolled out 
a universe something after this style: Stepping 
forward into the universe of nothing, with His shirt 
sleeves rolled up. He stretched forth His great 
infinite hands and took two handsful of nothing 
and rolled nothing into something, then stepped 
forward and placed this lump of something that 
He had created out of nothing there and called it 
the Sun, and started it spinning upon its axis ; then 



58 Spirit Man in Relation to Psychic Man. 

He took another lump of nothing, bowled it into 
space, and called it Mercury ; then He took another 
lump of nothing, rolled it hard, and bowled it into 
space and called it Venus, and so on until the uni- 
verse was made. This must be abandoned as too 
far fetched and too limited a concept. 

No, the spirit of God is in nature, and nature is 
the coat he wears — this mighty universe — the phil- 
osophy of which is so perplexing, a philosophy of 
clothes and nothing more. Within this physical 
man there resides a spirit man, and the spirit man 
made this physical body — made it, shaped it, de- 
signed it, executed all the work in it under an 
hereditary environment, and when the intent and 
purpose of the spirit has been accomplished the 
physical body is laid aside, and Oasser gets out and 
leaves the palace in which he lived behind him, 
and gazes on his new relationships and expression. 
He then sees his body, it has parts, organs, func- 
tions, and capabilities. It has an atmosphere like 
the physical body ; it has the same or developed 
atmosphere which it brought with it when it was 
simply a soul, for did not that soul live before it 
came and made that body ? Are there not millions 
of souls already housed in relativity with j'our 
soul, here and now, struggling, waiting, waiting 
for their day of incarnation ? 

What is your blood ? The home of souls. What 
does science say to you upon this subject? The 



Spirit Man in Relation to Psychic Man. 59 

science of histology tells you that every blood 
corpuscle is possessed of nuclei. And what are 
nuclei? Two small, unthinkably sized tadpoles, 
living in every blood corpuscle circulating in your 
arteries. The millions of inhabitants within you 
form the basis on which your soul can hold itself 
in a communal co-partnership with physical expres- 
sion, and when you pass into the spiritual world 
those elements of soul expression that are able to 
go with you go, and they are in the magnetic at- 
mosphere of your spiritual body, and they are 
germinal elements in the great atmosphere in which 
you are living; and think you that you could live 
here — think you that you could transmute energy 
that has no thought into energy that has thought? 
That would be a miracle. You have to take that 
great energy of the universe, that great potency of 
the universe that is to be expressed some day, you 
have to take it in through those lungs, you have 
to breathe it into your blood — the breath of life, 
the soul of soul; and so the transmutation of the 
magnetism of the soul goes on. This master soul, 
this master workman, with his millions of slaves 
under his feet builds himself, rises to his dignity, 
and goes on and on, and that affinity that he had 
always is continued, and that man-soul rushes on 
in the evolution of his conscious progress, while 
those souls struggling behind are coming on, and 
his inspiration is beating upon the mighty fortresses 



60 Spirit Man in Kelation to Psychic Man. 

of their intelligences, and they are ascending. His 
inspiration is general, and it rolls back in the form 
of a mighty inspiration to the race that is behind. 
So that the duration of expression of a great soul 
— of thy soul — will last for ages and ages. 

German scientists have already established the 
fact of the nuclei ; that life is built up of these 
entities. I affirm that they come from the spiritual 
world. : Science has demonstrated their existence, 
and in this fact you have a solution of the evolu- 
tionary origin of man, not of the origin of nature, 
or the absolute origin, but of the stages of origin, 
of the epoch of origin — and in this atmosphere of 
magnetism we find this soul life, and this is the 
healing power that you give to the weak and to 
the feeble. 

Here you come to a wretched constitution, a fee- 
ble woman of mental constitution and temperament, 
a small medulla oblongata and narrow thin lungs, 
delicate personality, and not likely to live. The 
healer brings his magnetic atmosphere and the 
spirit increases the force of its germ life; these 
same germs to be the future tenants of body and 
express personal intelligence. Under almost all 
conditions there is power enough in these germs to 
cure all diseases if sufficient will-power is brought 
to bear by the healer. 

Probably some of these things you have never 
heard of before. Ah, the future ages will hear 



Spirit Man in Relation to Psychic Man. 61 

a great deal about them. Are not the best of 
the scientists now working in the domain of the 
invisible, and are finding in that domain many- 
solutions to the great problems held in the secret 
of nature. In the microscopic world lie the won- 
derful beginnings of form life on earth. 

These elemental monad-men, so called by us, are 
the very genesis of sex ; the division of the living 
forces of the organic nature. Everywhere in all de- 
partments of life you will find the mark of sex. 
Back of all visible action in generation lie the ele- 
ments that control the matter of sex. The greatest 
question of the age is to what extent does this invi- 
sible monad act on mental and physical states, deter- 
mining the quality and character of the lives of men 
to-day. There is something below temperament 
and instinct, something under the power of heredity, 
these monad-men are there and they are elFecting 
great spiritual and physical results by their presence 
in the life-blood of the race. 

It seems as if the intellectual soul stood at the 
top of the pyramid of life, and that it commanded 
all these elemental forms of life and mind ; that 
health and disease were eff"ected by them ; that all 
the forms of temperament and phases of character 
were more or less produced by them, and that they 
had a relation to the atmosphere and vegetable life, 
and that the very quality of life was determined 
by them. They are elements in the powers of life 



62 Spirit Man in Rela'Hon to Psychic Man. 

itself, and cannot be discussed apart from the or- 
ganic forms of life. 

These living elements are subject to feeling and 
will. Mental states affect them, and they affect 
changing states in the body. Good magnetism has 
strong elements in it. The greatest healers are the 
men who have abundance of these vital elements. 
I would define magnetism as an atmosphere of vital 
elements, or monad-men, lying back of all vital 
form. They are to the chemistry of spirit what the 
atom is to the chemistry of matter. All planes of 
substance co-ordinate in certain given forms of 
motions — spirit and matter and all their interlying 
planes. 

As all magnetism responds to mind, the mind 
becomes a moving force, whether it be conscious 
mind or unconscious mind; it is force that acts 
upon the magnetic principles of life. Those cures 
claimed to have been made by Mental Scientists and 
Faith Cureists and Magnetic Healers are all due 
to the power of the spirit over physical states, and 
the action of personal magnetism — that magnetism 
which has entered into the formation of ceils, the 
result of the crystallization of blood into organic 
tissue. 

In these monad-men, in the atmosphere of the 
spirit magnetism, there is no perception even, no 
reason even, yet born. In these monad-men there 
is instinct. It came by the contact it had with the 



Spirit Man in Kelation to Psychic Man. 63 

matter-man, and in its evolution through the mat- 
ter-man it attained instinct, and this is its heredity; 
it brings this heredity conditioned by the mental 
states of the matter-nature, and it can be im- 
pressed by the magnetism of spirits — the magnetism 
of elementary monad-men. Hence these conditions 
that come into the birth place of life are of an 
extraordinar}'' nature, and sometimes the likeness 
of the child-will representing the dominating monad 
or elementary instinctive intelligence. Noble 
women, exalted women, virtuous women, beautiful 
women, have given birth to bad sojis, but nature, 
not the women — the monad-men, not the women — 
have caused the abnormal development of animal 
propensities that have come from the unusual aggre- 
gation of those in the generic forms of life. Many a 
mother has lived her life and gone to her everlast- 
ing existence with an aching heart, with a tear in 
her eye, lamenting that she ever gave birth to such 
a child. The child is not her child. Parentage has 
limitations. 

The mother and the father of the child are but 
the vehicles for the soul to embody itself in matter- 
form and bring it into the realm of reason. All 
the instincts have been acquired by the soul before 
it attained the power to incarnate. It was in the 
condition to receive all the like powers from the 
activity it had in the organism while in contact 
with the mental life of the father or mother as it 



64 Spirit Man in Relation to Psychic Man. 

existed in the blood corpuscle. It did not begin 
to live when it took on the foetal relation, but 
before it entered the ovum it was already impressed 
with the instinctive characteristics of its future 
mentality. The mother brought to its aid other 
elements of the magnetic sphere and gave to it the 
whole resources of her own magnetic life, so that 
the monad-men of the magnetic sphere entered the 
plane of the new soul-life through the vehicle of 
motherhood. When she is in a very good magnetic 
state she will dominate the sex and largely control 
the constitution of the mental powers or genius ; 
when she is feeble or magnetically weak she will 
be the matrix of a male personality. 

The soul is not in itself sexed, but the sex is due 
to the magnetic relation it takes on at the time of 
conception. It is in itself both male and female 
as an element of pure soul, and contains all, but 
it has to express these under relations of changing 
environments, and the sex of the personality is 
fixed by the magnetic condition of the mother at 
the time of conception. 

It is very difficult to disturb an old idea like this 
that a man is a perfect personality, that his con- 
sciousness is a perfect one uninterfered with func- 
tion, but when I tell you that there are a great many 
influences at work to produce that consciousness, 
that it is dependent upon the relations and antece- 
dents which are too fine for the mind to perceive 



Spirit Man in Relation to Psychic Man. 65 

the coming of them. The soul is subject to influ- 
ences which do not approach consciousness on the 
sense-perceptive channel, but reach consciousness 
by the subjective channel, which is related to the 
spiritual sphere. Man is a creature subject to the 
influences thrown upon him, and his personality is 
limited and bent by them. The soul can only ex-^ 
press that which the condition of embodiment will 
allow or permit. Whatever may be in the soul 
above or below the line of sense-perception cannot 
be determined by sense, but the personality is a 
character and a power determined by the whole 
field of these influences and relations. With the 
death of the physical body and the birth of the 
personality of the spirit there is a great change 
due to the evolution of new condition in the sur- 
roundings of the soul. The loss of the physical 
body is an event that changes the mental state of 
the soul, and awakens dormant powers in it and 
enlarges the power of perception. The soul breathes 
in from the atmosphere of soul. Man's personality 
stands on a bare plain, subject to the wind, the 
storms and cyclones of spirit-thought, illumination, 
and clairvoyance. It breathes out the mind atmos- 
phere of the soul sphere; it gives out and it takes 
in. It gives expression to the mind ; it stores ex- 
pression of the mind ; thus it is a dependent and a 
changing personality as to capacity, but not as to 
the essential concept of consciousness. 



66 Spirit Man in Relation to Psychic Man. 

Aa eternal personality must be given up for an 
eternal individuality. I am eternally conscious, 
but I am changing so fast that my faculties become 
enlarged, and faculties become added to me that 
I can speak of myself as having faculties which 
once I did not have, and that between the coming 
of the faculties are to be found the chapters of my 
conscious life. Each chapter of my conscious life 
being a personality carried along to my new life 
as instinct. Instinct is that which my soul carries 
with it from previous relationship made and passed 
in matter, which states of expression have pre- 
pared the way for the expression of the spirit's con- 
sciousness. The rational mind cannot explain the 
clairvoyant consciousness, that is, reason is below 
clairvoyance. It is in time and place as thought 
relation, but clairvoyance is not in time and place 
relation. It sees the past and the future, and thus 
is the consciousness that pertains to the conscious- 
ness of the original Intelligence of Nature. To 
know the entire past of time and the future of 
time are attributes of a being greater than man. 
So a spiritual being is greater than a man, and can 
only know man personally by going into its past — 
into the personality of man. The divine attribute 
of clairvoyance — knowing the past and future — is 
the manner of perceiving in the spiritual sphere of 
the soul's expression; but while that soul is in the 
physical personality of expression the attribute of 



Spirit Man in Relation to Psychic Man. 67 

consciousness is reason, a lower plane of soul con- 
sciousness. When a soul on the spiritual plane of 
consciousness seeks to express in the personality of 
reason, which it requires in passing through the 
phjT'sical body, it vacates the vibrations of the spi- 
ritual consciousness for the time being that it may 
enter the sphere of a lower vibration and commun- 
icate and enter into the perfect relationship with 
man, and evolve over again the contents of the rea- 
soning powers, and so enters upon and covers the 
plane of its own personal memory. On that retro- 
spective plane it can give and receive inspiration. 
The soul in this relation to man becomes the Christ, 
the inspirer, the logos of Plato and John. Reason 
falls below the spiritual plane of consciousness. The 
spiritual consciousness can only be guessed at by 
those who have attained to an elemental degree 
of that power, as seen in the best condition of 
mediumistic clairvoyance. Its real power is found 
only in the spiritual consciousness. 

I said that the mother will, under her strong 
magnetic conditions, dominate the sex, and she will 
also dominate the genius. Now this genius may 
also be the result of the father's strong magnetic 
personality, or the mother's personalitj'^ ; or it may 
come from the pre-determined purpose of a center 
of spiritual power that has a certain definite aim 
and plan to work out on the earth-plane, and so 
has to create conditions for the production of a 



68 Spirit Man in Relation to Psychic Man. 

real epoch man. These men come but at very rare 
intervals of time : they have been the creators of 
new conditions. Sometimes they have appeared in 
the realm of philosophy ; sometimes in the realms 
of political government, and have changed the 
power and character of empires and states ; some- 
times they have come with new religious thought, 
and changed the conduct and faith of a people. 
The poet and the artist, and the musician too have 
come at the bidding of great epochal centers of 
spiritual power, determining the era for a change. 
in the character of dominating belief, taste, and 
thought for the time being. Genius is so closely 
related to magnetic and inspirational states that a 
temperament must be made and all the physical 
conditions created for the product in the child of 
all these attributes, which serve to make a man 
of great spiritual and intellectual capacity. 

The brilliant civilizations of past ages, which 
have long ago faded from the perspective vision 
of the historian, are the product of these periods 
of great centralization of spirit power on the race 
of man. In recent times this power has often ap- 
peared, for these recent times have been unusually 
fertile in great and startling inspirations and great 
geniuses, whose mentality have filled the world with 
the greatness of their work and the magnificence 
of their inventive creations. 

The remarkable changes and development of the 



Spirit Man in Relation to Psychic Man. 69 

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have given to 
the world such surprising results and wonderful 
inventions, that it can be truly said that at no period 
of the world's history before have such great and 
wonderful inventions been given to the world. But 
these inventions were the outcome of great mental 
states being created by the spirit world to do the 
necessary work. At the crisis of events the man 
needed comes forth and does his work with that 
rare power which can only come from those who 
are specially fitted for such work. Do not suppose 
that every crisis in the world's history brings forth 
the truly wonderful creator of great changes, great 
thoughts, great deeds. The special periods are rare 
and are conditioned by the predetermining power 
of the spirit world. 

The development of things in the material world 
is by a process that is mechanical, or what is called 
natural law, but as we approach the mental realm we 
see the action of will, plan, purpose, design in the 
coming and going of the events and changes of time. 

The scientist readily recognizes the operations 
of laws in the conduct and product of the pheno- 
mena of nature, and fails to see a guiding force of 
intelligence in the development of the character- 
istics of civilization and history. 

Nature presents the operations of unconscious 
force and the activity of intelligence force, the latter 
as seen in the conduct of human consciousness. 



70 Spikit Man in Eelation to Psychic Man. 

There comes to me at this moment a brilliant 
spirit who lived on the earth plane thousands of 
years ago in Egypt. He brings to me the karma 
of a magnificent life. His thought-temple I see. 
The temple in which he taught was on the banks 
of the Nile, and I see the waters of the Nile slowly 
making their way to the sea; the parched earth has 
become fertile, and abundance of food is certain 
for the season of need. I am in the temple, in the 
sanctuary of that temple, in the holy place, the 
great crowd forming the congregation devoutly 
worshipping at the shrine of Osiris; and here in 
this holy place are the virgins of the sanctuary, 
specially prepared instruments of the spirit world, 
to give interpretation to the great spirit of life and 
nature — they are the mediums of that day. I see 
a stand made of the wood ebony ; a tripod on 
which stands a silver bowl polished and having 
beautiful chasings and wrought design of celestial 
beings and hanging flowers, and bowing trees, fes- 
tooned with trailing and creeping vines. Inside 
the bowl is suspended by a silken cord a golden 
plumb-bob ; a virgin sits at the tripod with her white 
cap on her head. I hear the sweet but melancholy 
chime of sweet bells and a stringed instrument. It 
is a lovely scene. Soft sounds and delightful gloom ; 
mystery and wonder stir my mind. Here the gods 
talk with men. The priests come in and out. 
Messages are being received from the god. The 



Spirit Man in Relation to Psychic Man. 71 

bowl is a little bell for the swinging plumb-bob to 
swing to-and-fro in an intelligent order, and the 
communications are received and whispered to the 
priest, and he retires to speak with the people the 
word of the Great Lord of the spheres; and the 
ancient spirit teaches me that there are coming to 
the world great changes in the character of modern 
civilization; that Asia is coming into the pale of 
active competitive thought and industry with the 
western world, and that the great ideas of modern 
science and inventions are going to be adopted and 
shared in those lands, which are now the seat of 
primitive superstitions and crude manners derived 
from ages long past, but preserved with a devout 
religious care and simplicity ; they are to go into the 
vortex. The new age demands new thought and 
new men, and they are coming to the earth. The 
conflict which rages will end in the real coming of 
liberty, which means the great emancipation of man 
from present conditions. The world belongs to 
man and he enters into possession ; labor troubles 
end under the sway of real beneficent government 
of love and justice. This is the prophecy of human 
redemption from ignorance and poverty, and from 
the hard curses of excessive daily toil. This is the 
aspiration of all philanthropic reform of all the 
moral movements of the age. How beautiful is 
the sight. It is man turning to heaven to get the 



72 Spirit Man in Relation to Psychic Man. 

best of the thought, counsel, and guidance of the 
beneficent wisdom of nature. 

This ancient spirit teaches me. 

The ancient nations knew the meaning and the 
folly of great personal and family wealth, which 
was used for the aggrandizement of the political 
power of the family and the subjugation of the 
people — the enslavement of the people. They 
cultivated the spirit of art to adorn their homes 
and persons, costly ornaments had to be produced 
and costly apparal, and to the extent of their pro- 
duction they cultivated the arts. You are repeat- 
ing the same error, but you are in the ancient 
thought, you are inspired by these ancient spirits 
and cannot yet be liberated, but the liberating 
thought is coming to the earth to epochal minds. 
Clairvoyance is coming as an elemental faculty into 
the brain and intellect of man, and these old civili- 
zations will be beaten back and perish, and man 
shall reap that which is his own by the laws of 
nature and natural rights. 

What is the matter with Asia, what has the United 
States to do in Asia ? What is the matter with 
that trans-Siberian railroad in China? What is the 
matter with China, with Japan? The great spirits 
of the ancient family of races are rolling on the 
earth their inspiration, and the civilization of the 
far back ages is coming into rythmic harmony with 
the civilization of the western world, and there is 



Spirit Man in Relation to Psychic Man. 73 

going to be a wonderful change. Clairvoyance is 
coming into the statesmanship of the world, but 
that will come under the faculty of deduction, and 
also there will be an inductive illumination. 

The day when this century and this Republic, 
were born was an age in which men talked of lib- 
erty. They had brought this thought out of the 
trammels and chains of a religious despotism and 
superstition. They had come into the world to 
plant a new civilization, a new form of religion, to 
make man happy, and the dominant idea was 
Liberty. But liberty is no longer a term shouted 
from the watch-tower of human progress. It is not 
that liberty has come; it is not that, but it is the 
achievements, the virtues of liberty, the power that 
liberty can give; that intellectual intercourse and 
spiritual illumination can give to .art, mechanics, 
trade, agriculture, to home, to body, to humanity, 
and to life. Liberty means all this ; and also that 
the spirit-man is in psychical relativity with the 
mortal man, and this co-partnership of the two 
worlds will become more apparent as days go on, 
and the peculiar inconsistency of the church will 
become more clear, and there will be a greater 
union in the impulses of civilization than ever in 
the past — that liberty will come even to those of 
this generation. 

I define clairvoyance for you to be the power or 
facultj'' of a soul that can in its revelation give 



74 Spirit Man in Kelation to Psychic Man. 

expression to whatever is created for its eye, its 
atmosphere or thought, whether it shall be the 
thought of the past or the thought of the future 
rolled into the thought of the now; that is clair- 
voyance, and this is the consciousness of the spirit- 
man. When he has lived, when he has departed, 
when he has thrown from himself these monad- 
men which he brought through the physical organ- 
ism of his body, then he is ready for celestial states. 
That soul that changed him to a physical expres- 
sion; that soul that brought him through a monad 
— as a monad through a bodj'- — that soul is away 
up yonder in celestial spheres facing the divine, 
touching the magnetism of celestial states and 
generating the celestial spheres. This is your life 
line; this is the order to which you belong; this is 
why you live. You love the companions that you 
have met in these forces; you are in the family; 
you are in the heritage ; you are in the law. 

I have given you this that you might see the 
process of the evolution of great intelligences — the 
necessity of passing through life. Wliat is the 
need of passing through life if you are not going 
to higher and to grander states ? 

As I look back and see the growth of the psy- 
chometric faculty that discovered these truths, and 
as I see the rise of these great truths of personality 
and the soul awakening to its experiences, I see 
that there is in the heredity of the mind's atmos- 



Spirit Man in Relation to Psychic Man. 75 

phere great possibilities for advancing and realiz- 
ing truth to-day and truth in the future. As I feel 
the inspiration that comes up from man, as I feel 
the inspiration that comes up from nature, as I feel 
the inspiration that comes from celestial states, and 
as I center in this great life, what a glow of con 
scious joy, of happiness, comes to me. To be happy 
— not to have pleasure, but to be happy ; to have 
the J03'" of truth is something man can only dream 
of as yet. The artist even has not had it yet, for 
he looks at his picture, and it is never finished; 
the orator looks at his oration, it is never perfect; 
the poet looks at his poem, it is never completed. 
On and on. But the gratification that comes and 
the glow of finished power is happiness; the grati- 
fication of perfect love is happiness ; afiinity or one- 
ness of being in the life stream is the highest love. 
You are loving life, you are loving the world, 
you are ambitious for success, you are struggling 
for personal supremacy, you want to succeed. All 
this is in the order of right and in the pathway of 
duty, but I feel none of these; I have risen out 
of these; they left me when the monad-men left 
me, when I came to my knowledges, when I came 
to my clairvoyance. But after breathing these 
thoughts out to you I cannot linger, I cannot hold 
the medium, for I am burning up brain cells, and 
as a stranger from the spirit spheres above 1 greet 
you with love and blessing. 



LECTURE IV. 

THE SOUL. 

It is customary now to refer all natural pheno- 
mena in external nature to have come by the pro- 
cess of evolution. It is not usual for a scientist to 
pay his respects to the old theories of the past 
relating to the absolute origin of all things. The 
absolute origin is so far out of the range of scien- 
tific investigation that it is far better to leave the 
paths through the fog-land of speculation to be 
pursued by those minds alone addicted to the occult, 
the mysterious realms of darkness lying beyond 
the phenomenal ken of human intelligence. When 
reason dawned, in the earliest ages of the race, 
and faintly burned in the most highly developed 
brain, the order, system, and plan of nature, and her 
wonderful forces, struck that weak flame with the 
great ideas of order, system, and plan. That nature 
was not a chaos, a blundering expression of blind 
force, so this man early addicted himself to spec- 
ulative vices, and wandered out into those reahns 
of causation where he had no lamp to guide his 
feet, and no voice to speak to him the thought and 

word of directing truth. He formulated systems 

76 



The Soul. 77 

of speculative truth, rude and childlike, that have 
with amazing vitality held their ground, to some 
extent, even down to the present day. Old error 
is hard to uproot. Man is just as eager to conserve 
his old errors as he is to save his new truths. 

The subjects which attracted his attention were 
in the heavens above him and on the earth beneath 
his feet. 

The everlasting question came to this early man 
as it comes to us. What is the cause of all this 
display of order, system, and plan in the pheno- 
mena of nature ? 

What is nature ? 

What is this great universe above our heads and 
these worlds of space ? 

What is this organic life, which sits in every 
form we see on the landscape over which we walk, 
and what are all those hidden powers of life ex- 
pressed in every growing and every breathing thing 
around us ? 

Such questions are not novel. These are the 
common acts of every mind. The limitations put 
on the capacity of the philosopher prevented him 
correctly giving an answer to these questions. 

Science deals with the phenomena of nature. Its 
work is to describe them and their relations to each 
other, but the absolute cause is not yet a question 
to trouble the scientific mind. 

The universe of matter and of mind are with us, 



78 The Soul. 

they exist. How they first came, before there was 
a man to see the way things were first born, and 
the map or traces of the first things, and their com- 
ing and going, and no voice existed to tell or teach 
the truth of the Absolute. Man to be useful to 
himself must keep his work and mind in action 
within the utilitarian pale of the knowable, and not 
waste his time and powers in entering into that 
realm which can never provide for him a single 
demonstrated truth. 

Science begins with matter and intelligence as 
being already in existence, and assumes the postu- 
late that matter and energy have been eternally 
corelated, and that nature is in harmony with her- 
self, and that the great principle of order and in 
telligence are in themselves phases or attributes of 
the eternal world of matter and of mind. 

Evolution is a populor doctrine, hardly modern 
in its origin, but modern in its weight and authority, 
as a method in which nature works out her pheno- 
mena. The characters and phases of the pheno- 
mena presented in nature are subject to eternal 
change of form and expression. That the action 
of circumstances upon life and its systems of or- 
ganization tends to change the organic character 
and power; and that this constant tendency to 
variation accounts for so many different forms of 
organic life and expressions of personal intelligence 
seen in the animal kingdom of nature. Evolution 



The Soul. 79 

is generally becoming acceptable to the scientific 
thinkers as the best hypothesis for explaining the 
coming and the going of natural phenomena. It 
is, therefore, likely to a correct basis on which to 
work the universal operations of nature. This law 
of evolution must therefore be applied to all exist- 
ences; as a law it must be universal. All forms 
and capacities must be subject to change and re- 
modelment, according to the habit and processes 
surrounding any given form of life. But this can 
only be said of the phenomena of nature. There 
are certain elements of nature that are primal; that 
never change in themselves; that -are fixed forces 
and eternal. In . the building of the universe there 
must be some common raw material or stutf never 
in itself subject to change or decay. This must be 
the eternal foundation on which the changing struc- 
tures of nature exist. We say then that the chem- 
ical elements of nature persist and are essential 
existences, not subject in themselves to the pro- 
cess of evolution; to suppose the contrary would 
be to let into the operations of nature a failure of 
action and of order and stability, that would wreck 
the fabric of all things, and admit the possibility 
of all nature making a grand failure and ending in 
a fiasco. 

The work done for science by the wise and inde- 
fatigable labors of Charles Darwin in establishing 
the hypothesis of evolution, can never be fully esti- 



80 The Soul. 

mated. He did not seek to explain the origin of 
all things. He did not touch the question of the 
Absolute Cause of all things, nor did he dispose 
of the great question of design or the existence of 
a designing intelligence in nature. These questions 
belong to the realm of philosophical speculation 
and not to science. But his work sets forth the 
manner of the coming of the diiferent organic forms 
of life found in nature. 

The modern spiritist or spiritualist must walk 
with Darwin. No teaching can be true and lasting 
which does not harmonize with the fact of evolution. 
Nature is consistent. 

The greatest law presented by the mental pheno- 
mena seen in organic life is that mind is in perfect 
corelation with the size, quality, and the develop- 
ment of the brain. The brain being the product 
of a long series of epochs in the course of evolu- 
tion, every faculty of the mind at one time or 
another came into being as a function of conscious- 
ness. It must be stated that reason itself came by 
the same process, and is indeed at the present time 
under slow process of change. It must be recog- 
nized as a truth that the state in which we find 
reason to-day is a more correct reason than the 
reason manifested by the primative men. Experi- 
ence has been the main factor in the development 
of the powers of nature, nature itself containing 
the constitution of reason. In the system of pheno- 



The Soul. 81 

mena presented by nature the facilities of reason 
have come out of the constant habit of life being 
subject to their influence. Eeason itself being the 
expression of the innate constitution of the power 
which is expressing itself in nature. Power in 
reality is nature. Intelligence and non-intelligence 
are attributes of this eternal power. But let that 
go, reason is the product of the orderly operations 
of nature and the consciousness of these operations 
is conscious personality ? 

The strength of any one of the faculties of reason 
is dependent on the nature of the brain and organic 
development of the ganglia of the nervous system, 
the cerebral mass of brain being the determining 
factor of mental power. The physical basis of the 
power and quality of the mind is here conceded 
and aflirmed. The brain being the conditioning 
factor in the extent of the function of conscious- 
ness. This being so a study of the development 
of the brain in man will comprise the study of his 
mental growth and advancement since his first ap- 
pearance on the earth. The faculties being powers 
added to consciousness gradually in the regular 
course of development. These faculties form there- 
fore a key to enable the student to read the grad- 
ual unfoldment of the power of the animal and 
rational consciousness. The unfoldment must have 
been very slow and gradual. In some parts of the 
world where there existed more favorable condi- 



S2 The Soul. 

tions the career of mental progress must of neces- 
sity have heen more rapid. The early man, pressed 
hard by his surrounding conditions, had to make 
provision against the rigorous foe of his life and 
happiness. This called into existence all the capa- 
city of his watchfulness and invention. He gradu- 
ally came to know the protective use of things 
around him, and thus he made a gradual progress 
in the knowledge of the powers of nature, and 
this action of knowledge and necessity awoke in 
him higher capacity to think, will, and execute. 
The history of the correct circumstances of his life 
would show the causes of the manner of the growth 
of his mind. But this is not the place to prove 
that man has thus gradually come out of the simple 
conditions of mentality, I state it only just in pass- 
ing to show that no field of nature is exempt from 
the operation of evolution. The body of man has 
changed to meet new conditions, and with that 
change there has come, too, a change in the mental 
capacity, one has gone with the other to make a 
perfect and constant fitness for the new phase of 
life, but, as I said before, all these changes have 
come very slowly and with an imperceptible tread 
at the time, and that it is because long ages have 
passed that these great changes become apparent. 

Mind is the function of all the faculties of con- 
sciousness brought into exercise by the environ- 
ment. Mind is not an entity. Its complex func- 



The Soul. 83 

tions have organs in the brain and nervous system. 
Each organ does its own work, and the united work 
of all these organs is mind. These organs are built 
up and kept in repair like all the other organs of 
the body. The life-principle is very active and 
causes a great dissipation of energ}'-, and it has to 
be restored to the organs from the blood, which is 
made out of the food supply. Both mental energy 
and muscular energy are made, or rather taken, 
from the food we eat. So much muscular motion re- 
presents so much food, and so much thought stands 
for so much food taken into the stomach each day. 
I do not mean that energy is thought, that the 
energy that is stored in a pound loaf of bread be- 
comes, when brought into the new relation with 
blood and the brain, is thought. I do not think so. 
I think that thought is of the spiritual sphere of 
being, and is an action that is purely in the sphere 
of the soul itself. I do not think that energy stored 
in food can be transmuted into thought, but it can 
sujDply the chemical elements necessary to erect 
the at6mic polarities in the brain that come into 
corelated vibration with the soul. The brain be- 
comes the tool of the soul to carry forward into 
brain and organic relativity thought; through the 
body the soul thus comes into knowing relations 
with the external world. The brain becomes the 
molecular receiver of all that action going on in the 
soul that its polarities can reach. 



84 The Soul. 

Vibration is not thought. The molecules of the 
brain may vibrate at any rate you may name ; mere 
motion is not thought ; motion may be the symbol 
of thought ; so many vibrations may stand for any 
kind of thought which two persons may agree upon, 
but any manner of communicating thought can 
only be by symbol. Before a set of vibrations can 
be understood it must have some collective order, 
arrangement, and form, then it can be adopted as a 
symbol. When a transmitter of electrical energy, 
under the Marconi system of wireless telegraphy, 
acts upon a receiver at a distance of some miles, the 
vibrations are understood symbols, and the vibra- 
tions are not thought nor things, nor facts, but are 
simple changes of vibrations which have an agreed 
meaning, and as such become language, the sign 
and symbol of thought. All the actions performed 
by the cells of the brain are but vibrations and not 
thought. The thought of consciousness is in the 
soul itself, and can not be born in matter or in any 
evolution of brain or celluar vibration. 

Conditions of matter are the vehicle for the ex- 
pression and transmission of thought, but not the 
thought-maker. Consciousness is not a property of 
matter. But supposing consciousness to be a pro- 
perty of some states of matter, then we have two 
kinds of matter so far apart from each other that 
they may be said to form distinctly two kinds of 
stuff, thinking stuff and non-thinking stuff. Sup- 



The Soul. 85 

posing then that to be so we have not helped to get 
rid of the soul, for the soul under that supposition 
becomes the thinking stuflf, and we are at once 
back into the old position. It would be absurd to 
affirm that all matter thinks, or that matter has the 
potency of thought, because then all matter would 
be in a thinking state. That thought, either active 
or potential, would at all times be present in mat- 
ter. The postulate has brought us face to face with 
so many states of matter. We have solids, liquids, 
gases, and ethers. All vibratory states of matter 
differing from one another in the manner of mole- 
cular change. The basis being a common ether. 
While this vibration and the different ratios of 
molecular action account for the different modes of 
matter, the mode itself gives no indication either of 
latent of active intelligence in itself. But the man- 
ner in which the combined phenomena or the col- 
lective phenomena of nature act show that the 
power of action is under some determining principle 
of intelligence. Nature has order and system. Or- 
der and system without determining thought would 
be impossible. I hold, therefore, that there is in 
nature a thinking formative principle, or cause, at 
the back of, or in, all existences. 

The soul, I postulate, as a primal intelligence, a 
formative force corelated in all the conditions of 
phenomenal nature. That is itself intelligence, and 
that is the ruling principle in form and thought 



86 The Soul. 

expression. This soul I hold to be the architect 
of all bodily structures under an environment of 
standing heredity. That the surroundings under 
which a soul comes into body determines capability 
to express itself. The nature of the embodiment, 
its simple or complex structure, fixing the order and 
power of its place in nature and its intelligence. 
It seems to me to be in harmony with the highest 
rational principle to believe that the soul is a neces- 
sary intelligent entity, simple and uncompounded, 
an element of thinking stuff that is in itself self-exis- 
tent, that is, that is not a derived or made entity, 
that it always has existed, and that it always will 
exist. I believe this because if the soul entity had 
been created it had been created either by some- 
thing like itself, or something different from itself. 
It could not have been created by something differ- 
ent from itself because things which have nothing 
in common cannot be the cause of one another, if 
created at all it must have been created by some- 
thing like itself, which, under those conditions, would 
be the same, and therefore but a continuation of 
the same stuff, therefore I believe that the soul is 
uncreated, that the soul never began to be and will 
never have an end. 

Under the present conditions of my conscious 
expression I am not able to give the eternal biogra- 
phy of a soul ; I expect at some period of my spirit- 
ual consciousness to have a full view of all that my 



The Soul. 8T 

soul has realized or thought, or that it will have in 
the future, in its relative possibilities of expression. 

I believe that I am going forward to more com- 
plex states of mental relationships and expression, 
and that my personality is subject to great advances 
in power of thought and ability to know. This 
progress is for bodily and also for spiritual states 
of consciousness coming to the soul in the future. 
The end of the evolution of man on the earth- 
plane is not yet. He will be a being still more 
advanced in conceptive and inventive power. Man 
on earth will develop a complete clairvoyant con- 
sciousness, and know a broader field of natural 
phenomena, and approach the domain of cause with 
a greater grasp of being. The process of evolution 
is endless. To suppose the opposite is absurd. 

With the idea before me that the chain of con- 
tinuous evolution will remain unbroken it is fair to 
say and expect that in coming ages man will have 
a better brain than what he has to-day, and that the 
standard of reason will be higher, and that the con- 
stitution of reason itself will be improved, that is, 
that there will appear elemental faculties added to 
the capacity of reason as the course of mental evolu- 
tion appears. It is clear that the progress of man in 
the past is marked by the coming forth of at first 
elemental faculties, and then these same faculties 
become fuHy developed and form perfect function 
in the mind. The earliest appearance of man must 



88 The Soul. 

have been very low. in the power of mental expres- 
sion. The dawn of reason could hardly have in it 
the faculty of deduction. Some of the lower ani- 
mals so called have no apparent power of clear 
deduction, and when man came forth out of the 
mental darkness there were manifested in his men- 
tal operations but little if any of this faculty. As 
ages went on the experiences and exigencies of life 
produced the full power of this faculty. It must 
be equally true then that if the laws of nature are 
continuous the action of circumstances on man 
and his experiences must do for him what they did 
for him in more elemental states of his mentality; 
and in trying to give a general guess at what man's 
intellectual nature will be in that vast future of 
natural progress on this plane of earth, I must be 
guided and must take into full consideration the 
great uncertainty that will be in the general ele- 
ments which will go to make the future circumstan- 
ces of man on this earth, there must remain a large 
field of uncertainty about the period and the nature 
of the mind's new faculties that will appear. Already 
it can be discerned that the mind is forming a set 
of new faculties, which have a range of function far 
above the domain of mere reason. I refer to the 
faculities of psychometry and clairvoyance. Neither 
phase of function expressed by these powers is in- 
cluded in the constitution of reason; indeed, they 
seem to act without much relation to the higher 



The Soul. 89 

faculties of reason, why they are more related to 
the perceptive faculities than to the reflective facul- 
ties will appear in a moment. The perception in 
clairvoyance is the same as in reason. Every object 
to the chairvoyant eye will have form and size and 
color. The whole power of the sensational plane is 
retained, but it is not so in the higher faculties of 
reason. It does not reason. It knows. It is the 
directly knowing faculty. It knows without reflect- 
ing or even without the act of memory, for then it 
covers the field of memory with sight. It is not in 
a past nor a future, but all phenomena are in a vis- 
ible present. Reason cannot comprehend such a 
state of consciousness. It is the past and the pres- 
ent realized in a present and eternal perception. 
In the conditions of the human mind are the first 
appearances of these powers of psychometry and 
clairvoyance. The spiritual medium is one of the 
persons showing in an elemental way the appear- 
ance of the powers. Sometimes they are so weak 
in their action that the power falls into disrepute, 
for adventurers have sprung up and imitated the 
work of the genuine mediums, and much harm to 
the cause of mental science has been done in the 
public mind, and especially have the scientists, grave 
and serious men, addicted to the accurate measure- 
ment of natural facts, and who are not wedded to any 
special philosophy of life and destiny, been much 
constrained to treat the whole subject as one of 



90 The Soul. 

delusion and fraud. To treat the subject this way- 
is too hasty, and also unscientific, but much can be 
excused, seeing what has been attempted by those 
who have had no regard for fact or truth, who have 
palmed all sorts of contrivances on the credulous 
public as phenomena produced by the agency of 
the spiritual world. The safety of all truth consists 
in correctly seeing and knowing all the facts. 

I may say just a word here about the oriental 
mind in times past having done much speculative 
work as to the beginning of material things, the 
coming into existence of the world, the start of 
moral consciousness, and the absolute being of a 
God. These have been the fruitful themes of the 
ancient and oriental philosophers. India stands 
forth as being the most prolific and idealistic of 
the ancient nations in the work of religious devo- 
tion and speculation. The sacred books of India are 
very old and very numerous. They are character- 
ized by great spiritual sincerity, profound insight, 
moral elevation of tone, and a perfect resignation 
to the supreme power of God. By nature the 
Hindoo is devout and meek in spirit. He is not 
aggressive, nor cruel, but of a spiritual and devout 
mind. His superstitions are great, and hold hirn in 
perfect mental slavery to old philosophical teaching 
that has come down the ages from his forefathers. 
Hindoos have not been inactive in their spetiila- 
tions about the history, origin and powers as weU 



The Soul. 91 

as the ultimate destiny of the soul. Asia in fact 
has absorbed this very old idea that God is all 
things, and that the soul is an emanation from him. 
That his essence is pure intelligence, and that the 
soul of man is from this essence, and is itself of the 
nature of pure intelligence, but degraded by coming 
into matter. 

Greek idealism took hold of the same belief. In 
the best age of Greek thought the beliefs common 
to India began to appear and to gain some ascend- 
ancy. The scholars of those ages traveled from 
country to country in their early days to discover 
new truth, and to spread the truth they had. The 
nations which had in their character the most mili- 
tary genius did the most to foster their ideas 
amongst distant and foreign peoples. The soldier 
carried his priest with him, and stamped his beliefs 
on the prostrated nations to some extent, and thus 
modified and mixed the prevailing superstitions. 
Egypt was a great country, addicted to religion, to 
speculation on the origin of things, and the divine 
relationship of creative power to the soul of man. 
In the religious ideas of Egypt the soul has the 
stamp of a divine origin. The soul is a spark of the 
essence of God. Perfect before its descent into 
matter, but through matter returns to the perfect 
state which had been lost in its personal descent. 
Such were the fanciful dreams of ancient oriental 
thought. Time has brought great changes into the 



92 The Soul. 

realm of natural origin. The genesis of things can 
not be settled by the imagination, but it must be re- 
alized that the correct way to find the truths locked 
up in the archives of nature is to study nature, which 
science does, so that science is not presumptuous 
when it enters the domain of speculative philosophy 
and asks the question : What is a soul ? 

For a long time the mind of Europe took its 
salient features of belief from the Greek intellect, 
and the long contending forces stood face to face 
in the councils of the early Christian Church as to 
whether the Platonic or the Aristotelian philoso- 
phers should be paramount in the belief and teach- 
ing of the Church. The contentions have but just 
ended at this day. It has taken generations of 
thinkers and students of nature to close in and 
break the rule of philosophy in the Schools. Sci- 
ence has come to reign and direct the future course 
of speculation. 

Plato, the most profound thinker of all antiquit}^, 
and the most sweet and graceful spirit of all the 
teachers of antiquity, often turns to the soul as a 
subject for his most sublime meditations. He owed 
much to the great teacher that preceded him in time, 
and while seeking the crown of an original thinker, 
did not lack the sense of gratitude toward those 
teachers who had laid down much that was essen- 
tial to a perfect mental philosophy. He was both a 
creator and a preserver of thought. That which he 



The Soul. 93 

discerned as truth in other philosophies he incor- 
porated into the body of his own thought. Amid 
the disputations and the social convulsions which 
soon attacked the Greek mind and the loss of the 
independence of its government, they soon became 
confused, and their teachings less worthy and con- 
sistent in thought. The battle of philosophy was 
soon removed from Athens to Rome, a wider theatre 
of power and world influence. The power of Rome 
carried the thought and the beautiful arts of the 
Greeks to all parts of the earth where the arms 
of the conquerors could reach. Thus Christianity 
obtained an easy conquest over the rude and bar- 
barous habits and superstitions of Europe. For 
some centuries the christian philosophers con- 
tended with each other about the origin and nature 
of the soul. Some being inspired with the teachings 
of Aristotle, and others devoted to the doctrines of 
Plato as presented in the Logos. The incarnation 
of the immortal soul in the life of man, the nature 
of conversion and the coming and nature of the 
Holy Spirit were all derived ideas from the general 
activity of Greek idealism in the age preceding the 
introduction of Christianity to the Roman world. 
But the common belief that the soul of man was of 
the essence of God was a common belief difiused 
throughout the ancient world, and Christianity did 
not invent any new doctrine nor give any new char- 
acter or definition to God that had not been before 



94 The Soul. 

held by the barbarian so-called. The philosophy of 
Christianity is of the Greek and Egyptian family of 
speculation, and as time goes on science will correct 
the standing errors of faith and speculations. 

The soul in all ages of superstition was looked 
upon as the pure essence of God, and had in itself 
the seeds of perfection. Potentially it had all 
wisdom and goodness. That its imperfections con- 
sisted in its degration and enslavement in matter, 
and that the animal propensities did not belong to 
the immortal soul. That the animal soul perished 
with the death of the body, and that the pure intellec- 
tual principle alone survived to live and continue in 
the onward career of greater purity and perfection. 

The historical episodes of the soul's career in the 
celestial world, and its condemnation and its descent 
into matter, have been themes for the pious poets 
and speculators of antiquity. They have no value 
but as work, showing the gradual rise of the mind to 
more correct methods of reasoning and to more ra- 
tional methods of life. Man has been slow in coming 
for the correction of all his studies to the character 
and operations of nature. The closer man keeps 
himself to the order and conditions of natural truth 
the more accurate will be his thought and the more 
correct his life. The first view that nature was the 
product of an inferior deity, and very imperfect and 
corrupting to soul, was the processes of procreation, 
and the animal faculties of the mind were so adverse 



The Soul. 95 

to the cultivation of the spiritual virtues, that actu- 
ally nature became the adverse power of inspiration, 
and man began to believe the farther he could get 
away from nature the greater spiritual virtue he, 
would possess. Such were the egregeous errors of 
man when the flame of human reason hardly rose 
above the groveling passions of bodily indulgence 
and a base appetite. The effect of the belief of the 
absolute moral purity of God and the soul has led to a 
gradual evolution of the moral character of the race. 
Without this ideal and the anticipated glories of the 
world to come the sluggish and cruel barbarisms 
of the olden days would not have so speedily given 
way before the triumphant march of faith in God. 
This conception of an ideal perfection in the good- 
ness and justice of God made all peoples feel a desire 
to live in harmony with that ideal, so the character 
gradually was lifted, and the standard of social living 
became purer under the beneficent sway of the 
christian religion. While the ideal of righteousness 
was always human, always the product of the human 
mind, that ideal did the work, and through faith man 
became subject to the higher moral and inspirations 
of life. The power and action of the fiery passions 
were calmed and subdued, and an era of peace to 
the soul came that could not easily have come in 
any other way. 

This moral concession to superstition must and 
ought to be made, because a frame work of faith 



96 The Soul. 

may be incorrect or actually false, yet that moral 
ideality enshrined in the structure of that faith 
may tend to the general betterment of mankind. 

The abuses of the Christian name and the distor- 
tion of the Christian character can not be laid at 
the door of the great moral concepts on which the 
character of the soul and of God are founded. 

I think it will ever be retained in the thoughtful 
veneration of man that the soul is an element of 
absolute purity, like all the other elements of 
nature. There is nothing wrong or bad in nature. 

Amid the conflict and the jargon of contending 
Schools amongst the Greek and the Komans the 
question of the existence and the character of God 
was uppermost, and excited the fiercest spirit of 
party resentment. But it must be conceded that 
the flower of Greek thought and scholarhip are 
essentially Platonic. Plato carried the abstract 
conception of God ahead of the conceptions of the 
renowned thinkers of his time and for some suc- 
ceeding ages. It was the highest and most refined 
Pan-Theism the world had ever had. He tried to 
conceive God the universal and infinite intelligence 
manifested in the phenomena of nature. This ideal 
was too advanced for vulgar minds, and the Deity 
was conceived and worshipped by many nations as 
a personality, self-existent and apart from the forms 
of nature, and capable of exerting his power over all 
things, and had a residence in the celestial world. 



The S6UL. 97 

Platonism antagonized anthropomorphism. The 
Roman mind inclined to the latter form of thought, 
and christianty, in its dominant form, became and 
largely remains the latter. The spiritual and moral 
eifect remained. In both creations the intelligence 
and moral nature were perfect and absolute, so the 
ideal in moral results on man remained identically 
the same. The highest rule of sovereignty was 
perfect justice, and the eternal heart of the God 
was perfect goodness. 

If the Christians in their lives and practices could 
have followed the ideal, what a different world we 
would have had to-day. Man's religions are always 
better than he is himself practically. At the close 
of the Dark Ages following the decay of the military 
spirit engendered by the christian ardor of the 
Crusades, there came a calm and a philosophical 
spirit of change, partly due to the influence of the 
Saracens upon the Christians. The Christians in 
their onslaughts on the legions of Islam, and their 
intercourse with the devout followers of the Arabian 
prophet, imbibed the scholarship that had not been 
extinguished in the fires of Moslem conquests, they 
revived the classic learning of the ancients, and 
again the lamp of Plato began to burn. The learned 
occupant of the Papal 8ee, Hildebrand, fanned the 
flame, and soon the ideal dreams of metaphysicans 
became the rage, till the influence of the Baconian 
philosophy, which was but a restoration of the best 



98 The Soul. 

thought of Aristotle. The Inductive Method at last 
won a signal victory from and under the higher 
forces of logical precision, theology and philosophy 
passed under the most trying and serious clianges 
that had awaited them for ages. To that important 
change may be ascribed the changes that have come 
in succeeding ages. The age of a perfect faith 
waned and died when the real force of the scien- 
tific method took possession of the scholastic mind. 
The influence of the change — the death of the school- 
men — brought forward the modern spirit of religious 
and political reform. The soul was viewed as a 
real representation of God in man, and conscience, 
the moral monitor of the mind, ascended in author- 
ity over individual conduct to be supreme, and was 
regarded as the voice of God in the soul. The ex- 
treme of this philosophical and spiritual revolution 
was the birth of the extreme spirit of puritanism. 
Democracy itself took form, and changes, which at 
one time would have staggered the conservatism of 
Europe, entered into the political conditions of the 
Christian nations, and the dominant powers of feud- 
alism retired before the new power of the people. 
The doctrine of the immortality of the soul stood 
as the foundation of man's political and civil rights. 
This principle of personal right and liberty surpassed 
all the personal claims to political justice ever 
made in the world before. But after all, philosophy 
had not yet decided the questions involved in the 



The Soul. 99 

doctrine of eternal life and justification. Great 
problems inspired the religious controversies of 
those times. The justification of man, the myste- 
rious doctrine of Christianity was maintained to be 
through the sacrificial death of Christ, the son of 
God, and through his righteousness were all made 
righteous through faith. The struggle was to justify 
the ways of God to man. For more than two cen- 
turies, opening with the birth of the Reformation, 
the religious controversies were acrimonious, and 
tended to the disruption and dishonor of govern- 
ments and states. Partisan zeal went beyond all 
rational bounds, and persecution reigned supreme. 
Still the soul was the one perfect, pure entity to be 
forever housed in the kingdom of heaven with the 
all-perfect father. 

To-day science has come with her wand to solve 
some of the great mysteries of time and the future. 
The soul, the thinking entity, has become the sub- 
ject of scientific investigation as to its powers over 
the body, and those eff"ects that are seen in abnor- 
mal mental states. The hypnotic state uplifts the 
vail from obscure recesses of the soul, and the eye of 
mind widens to the grasp of broader fields of truth. 
It was supposed a little while ago that hypnotism 
settled a great number of subjects, but the fact is it 
has opened up more avenues of mystery than it has 
closed. The problems involved in Mind Reading 
have come to us, the problems of Psychometry have 

LofC. 



100 The Soul. 

grown, and the difficulties of changing personalities 
in the trance state have not yet been removed. 
The new psychologist has widened the field of in- 
vestigation, but has not settled the boundaries of 
the subject. The investigation covers all the phe- 
nomena of mind, and the far reaching questions that 
concern the durability and the changing relations of 
consciousness. The influence of the spiritual world 
comes more and more into sight as the phenomena 
of changing mental states are investigated. And 
it becomes clearer as a fact in nature that just be- 
yond the walls of human sense stand the eternal 
sentinels of the spirit world as guides and loved 
ones, helping to advance and strengthen the mental 
tides which ebb and flow from the great ocean of 
Mind in the eternal spheres of soul-being. The 
great universe of spirit is co-related to us, and we 
are acting with it in the world's changes and pro- 
gress. 

This fact, when realized by the human race, man 
will see and feel the true force and strength in pro- 
gress, and he will stand on a firmer principle of 
life, and weave the threads of his mortal happiness, 
and life purposes with greater insight of truth and 
a stronger hold on the consciousness of life. Great 
are the spiritual possibilities and revelations await- 
ing us in the future. 



LECTURE V. 

THE INFLUENCE OP INSPIRATION ON MAN. 

The capabilities and possibilities of the individual 
soul, extending its expression from state to sphere, 
from personality to personality, covering the grada- 
tions of sex as problems, have been before the 
thinking mind ever since there grew up a capacity 
for receiving the instruction of spirits in the great 
realm. Remember that Spiritualism is as old as 
the development of the faculty of intuition, and 
down through the ages there has always been a 
great and glorious inspiration moving the very 
inner springs of civilization. The profound histo- 
rian has not noted the divinity pulsating in phe- 
nomena; the scientific analyst of events has not 
taken note of the great moving central principle of 
nature, but the events of history and of life have 
been discoursed upon and put in historical order as 
if they had no relation with one another as phe- 
nomena in the domain of cause; but as there is law 
in the physical world, law in the mental world, 
there is law in the historical world. To suppose the 
contrary is to introduce a new element into the 



102 The Influence of Inspiration on Man. 

constitution of nature that will lead to confusion 
and dislocation. 

Once admit the existence of natural law in the 
development of physical nature you must admit it 
to exist in all departments of nature, for nature 
cannot be partly controlled by law and partly con- 
trolled by chance. The mind of intelligence can- 
not set aside the developing forms and processes 
of law, hence he who would think wisely and well 
must recognize in the operations of nature a uni- 
form action of law. Here comes in the philosoph- 
ical problem to be decided: Does intelligence pre- 
side in law ? Each philosopher must decide this 
according to the development of his capability in 
the classification of ideas. 

But does it not strike you that in the uniformity 
of law, in the persistence of order, there must be in- 
telligence? How could a thing be intelligible if it 
was not the expression of intelligence ? When you 
have chaotic phenomena you have no intelligence. 
When you shake a dice box with the twenty-six 
letters of the alphabet in it and throw them out upon 
the table they fall upon the table in chaos, they 
do not arrange themselves according to intelligence, 
and, therefore, when you come to look at the al- 
phabet thus lying upon your table the letters do not 
spell any words. Before these letters can spell the 
hand of intelligence must manipulate them. Before 
any flower can come forth out of the plant intelli- 



The Influence of Inspiration on Man. 103 

gence must be in the plant, and the expression of 
the evolution of the flower is an expression of the 
intelligence. This is the law. All the laws of 
nature express intelligence. All the laws of the 
District of Columbia express intelligence, and they 
express the sovereignty of an intelligent people. So 
in the constitution of the body of man, the sover- 
eignty of the soul is expressed in the laws of life, 
the laws regulating magnetism, the laws regulating 
generation, the laws regulating the variation of in- 
tellectual and spiritual power; intelligence being 
at the back of all phenomena make all phenomena 
intelligible. 

As the intellect of man creeps up the ascending 
scale of evolution it reaches the spiritual world, 
and reason — now then for the trouble ! — reason be- 
comes an instinct. What is an instinct? Instinct 
is a subjective power, that is fixed and does not 
change or improve by experience ; and that which 
does not improve by experience and has selective 
capability is instinct. Intellect in passing into the 
spiritual world becomes instinct, and ranges itself 
with the other instincts called animal instincts, and 
the soul ascending to the command of its spiritual 
body becomes a clairvoyant soul, and has a larger 
lordship over surrounding conditions. 

The phenomena of the spiritual world are pro- 
duced out of spirit. Now, I did not make this word 
" spirit " for you, but I take it because it has a ver- 



104 The Influence op Inspiration on Man. 

nacular use. I could not use a more difficult word, 
because there are attached to it certain theological 
meanings, and these meanings are very difficult to 
separate from it, but by "spirit" I mean a mode of 
stuff that is not matter; it is on a higher vibration, 
and, being on a higher vibration, the molecules are 
finer and richer and of a different nature ; and these 
molecular motions and combinations of spirit con- 
stitute a new order of things in rythmic relation- 
ship to all lower and grosser forms of motion, but 
the soul is at the top of all co-ordination. The soul 
does not suspend any law that is in operation in 
atomic nature, neither in matter nor in magnetism., 
nor in spirit, but adapts its action to the principles 
of.law, and uses law to promote the design and pur- 
poses of the soul. 

The soul has, in its development of personality, 
come into the expression of sex. You have been 
told that the soul has journeyed through different 
forms of expression until it expresses itself in the 
personality of man. With man you are familiar, 
with the spirit developed you are less familiar. You 
are faced with the sex problem. In the matter state 
you have the male and the female personality — the 
negative and the positive states of electrical action. 
The electrical action on the lowest planes of gen- 
eration is most apparent, but in reality there is not 
that difference in the constitution of the female 
personality and the constitution of the male perso- 



The Influence of Inspiration on Man, 105 

nality as you might think would appear. In the 
microscopic world, in the elemental expressions of 
life, there are many forms of life that are dual, 
where the male and the female express themselves 
in the same personality, so that it is not contrary to 
the laws of nature for me to affirm that there are 
states in which the dual soul expresses itself through 
one body, and as the soul ascends to the expression 
of personality in the union of the perfect marital life 
the souls become so closely related to each other 
that they express themselves in the same — shall I 
say the same? — celestial body, and we know this 
body in the spiritual world as the angelic body. It 
is a dual-sexed body ; that is to say, the travail of the 
two souls that are expressing perfect harmony pro- 
duces a perfect reflection of that harmony in a celes- 
tial angelic body, and in lower spheres in spirit life 
it will take expression of the most beautiful wavy 
lines and structual perfection th^t the genius of the 
soul's creative powers can set forth. Hence when 
spirits that even have been long in spirit life have 
watched the coming of these great spiritual beings 
they have seen them come clothed in light. This 
life is the vibration of a celestial magetism. 

There can be no expression only in the etheric 
spheres. Even in man you bring down these vibra- 
tions, and when the angel visits the conditions of 
development in spirit life it is only to make a more 
powerful connection with those units, and this 



106 The Influence oe Inspiration on Man. 

angel becomes an eonic, soul; that is to say, the 
great governor, the great light, the celestial wis- 
dom. It is by wisdom that we rise. Wisdom is 
the redeemer, and the more closely we can get to 
this magnificent light the more rapidly does the 
soul awaken to the divine consciousness in it. 

1 think I can take a simple, clear illustration 
for you from astronomy and show what is meant by 
the life line. Now, if you will take a great combi- 
nation of stellar worlds, on the law of the dynamics 
of the spheres, you will find that your sun is the cen- 
ter of the solar system, the system that is revolving 
around the solar orbit. The sun is revolving with 
her attendants like a great king and his courtiers 
— like a magnificent center away out there — and 
gathering in a large field innumerable millions of 
stars, forming a great center of astronomical energy 
around this magnificent polarity, and so rolling 
and gathering and gathering and rolling into one 
harmonious motion one gigantic stellar miracle. It 
is so with souls. 

There is one great soul. We are tending toward 
that great soul, and that great soul is tending 
toward other souls. We are on the line of affinity, 
and we have contracted this affinity through the 
stages of evolution we passed in acquiring perso- 
nality. We never lose that affinity we have gath- 
ered, hence there are people that you meet for the 
first time feeling sure ,that yon have met them 



The Influence of Inspiration on Man. 107 

somewhere before; feeling sure that it may have 
been in some other incarnation when it is only the 
same karma. J 

When a molecule, dominated by an elemental con- 
sciousness, has come into arterial corpuscular relat- 
ionship to your soul, and with the millions of cor- 
puscles now constituting the sources of life, you 
have formed a psychic relationship, and experiences 
of today are being imparted to them at second 
hand — a mere dumb transcrij)t of them is being 
transferred to these elemental states living as nu 
clei in the blood corpuscles, and as they rise toward 
personality they carry that heredity with them, and 
having carried previous heredities and lived them 
they come into foetal life, and you cannot, in the 
first stages of gestation, tell whether the form is 
going to be a fish, a dog, a horse, a mammal of what 
kind, but through the different stages and evolutio- 
nary tj^pes of heredity the expression made comes, 
because the creative soul has passed through these 
stages and taken on these karma, and is unrolling 
them. This constitutes heredity; it constitutes the 
heredity of sex; it constitutes the heredity of love; 
it constitutes also an elemental philosophical here- 
dity, and passes on and up, and is never lost in the 
genesis of the soul's evolution. It passes into in- 
stinct, and, as instinct, stimulates life. 

Has it never struck you with wonder when you 
have seen animals inferior toman drop their young? 



108 The Influence op Inspiration on Man. 

The intelligent perfecton of the j'^oung ; how readily 
they adapt themselves to the changed condition in 
the awakening moments of their independent exist- 
ence; they are ready to stand on their feet. For 
example, the colt or calf immediately after birth 
will-get up and seem to be possessed of a sufficient 
development of conscious intelligence to know 
where the food supply will be found, to be able to 
understand the language of the animal, to be warned 
of danger by the simple articulations of the animal. 
The teaching capabilities seem to be prominent. 
Man seems to be one of the most helpless creatures 
when born, requiring the greatest amount of atten- 
tion and the greatest amount of time for the expres- 
sion of that which is instinctive in him. Now this 
is a subject upon which you can study, but the law 
lies deep.' Through these evolutionary stages you 
have come. You have come, sometimes by what 
were epoch jumps, due to the conditions of intel- 
lectuality of the body through w^hich you have 
ascended, and these states of affinity will corres- 
pond to the intellectual magnetism in which you 
have been placed. 

Your world, then, is made for you. The degree 
of your talent, the sum total of your capability, of 
genius, is settled for you long before jou take upon 
yourselves the characteristics of the human. In a 
couple of years the science of bacteriology will throw 
a light upon this great study that will carry the 



The Influence op Inspiration on Man. 109 

genus horn® back into those animalculae spheres 
of being. 

The study of the soul is the study of giganic pro- 
cessess of nature's personal forms of expression, 
and no scientific intellect can carry any hypothesis 
as an explanation of generation that does not ac- 
cept the postulate that the soul is the creator there- 
of. The materialistic hypothesis will break down 
right at the threshold, it cannot stand for one mo- 
ment under the chain of sequences that are now 
visible in the gigantic study called histolog3^ 

I have so far been only upon the ground that is 
known, of what is now the common knowledge of 
the student, and the onward development is the 
work of the spiritual world, to reveal the encase- 
ments, the conditions of the soul in spiritual states. 

The old Hindoo idea that there would have to be 
a perpetual coming back in cycles to purge the ani- 
mal soul of its propensities, and giving the perfect 
soul expression in order to enter the perfect state 
or Nirvana — that idea is elemental. That idea is 
projected from a sphere that knew a great deal, but 
is still learning and climbing. Evolution is on- 
ward. Evolution is differentiation. Progress is the 
advancement toward complexity. Evolution in the 
spiritual world, in the direction of the angel, is the 
evolution of consciousness, and man, when he at- 
tains the intuitional stage, when he attains the 
clairvoyant expression, he has gone as far as matter 



110 The Influence of Inspiration on Man. 

can carry him — he has come to the plane of spirit 
— you have come to the plane of spirit and will 
evolve the latent possibilities of soul. 

What you call incarnation is embodiment. I 
want words, I mean embodiment in spirit, not em- 
bodiment in the lower vibrations ; you have passed 
through those, and they are registered in the ele- 
ments of foetal life ; they are registered in your in- 
stinct, in your animal propensities, in your moral 
emotions and intellectual faculties, for did not every 
faculty that you iDossess come by the impingement 
of personal experiences ? so the development of 
these magnificent powers of consciousness in the 
spirit world ; they have to be unfolded like the pages 
in a book by the evolution of new expressions. The 
amativeness of the instinctive man has not finished 
its work, and the sex life is eternally associated with 
the evolution of consciousness until it becomes ab- 
sorbed in the angel, and then it rushes on to fields 
of inexpressible power, consciousness, intensity, 
thought — eternal, immeasurable thought. 

I have no language at my command which will 
enable me to lead you up to these great altitudes of 
progress, but what I wish to do is to present to you 
a faint picture of a part — shall I call it a part? — of 
3^our destiny. It would not be worth while for infi- 
nite intelligence to produce a phenomenon like man 
on earth and end him there. It would not be worth 
while for the infinite intelligence in nature to pro- 



The Influence of Inspiration on Man. Ill 

duce a spirit and end him there. Infinite intelli- 
gence will never be satified with its condition of 
expression until it has made the vast universe of 
energy conscious — conscious energy. That which 
is mechanical is coming up to conscious energy ; it 
is the mighty Infinite coming to Himself; the 
mighty Infinite being born to a conscious knowledge 
of Himself; man envolving — and the evolution will 
be upon the discussion, upon the views, upon the 
aspects, upon the forms which the human mind will 
strike out of itself to become infinite. Not an idle 
work; not a mere amusement having no use. 

He who sends out of his consciousness the anthro- 
pomorphic expression of the infinite intelligence, 
making him an infinite man; the man who makes 
infinite intelligence an immanence of nature, a great 
soul of which the infinite is the expression, has given 
expression to another thought, and the two thoughts 
assist each other. In the negative and positive 
elements of thought the great thoughts become cohe- 
sive and disruptive. In the spiritual spheres they 
are things, and therefore it is a turmoil of thought 
in the struggle for expression with the souls in the 
spheres above you. They are coming to their know- 
ledge — awakening — just as the different notes that 
are in this instrument if struck will produce differ- 
ent tones, and each tone will awaken some great 
rythmic harmony in consciousness. Now, this is the 
spiritual world. Far is it from being a world of 



112 The Influence of Inspiration on Man. 

dreamy rest and poetical simplicity. Throw away 
the idea, never rest upon it any more, that the life 
of the spiritual world is an emotional sleep ; that the 
faculities of exalted creative intelligences are at 
rest, and that you are going to find happiness in the 
acclamations of praise to this Infinite Intelligence 
that you have built up there. You are not going 
to do this. You are not going to be the eternal 
solicitors of favors. The spiritual world is not an 
everlasting prayer meeting. The spiritual world is 
not a congregation of psalm singers. The spiritual 
world is a world of differentiated spiritual activities, 
thoughts and life, marvelously threading and inter- 
threading and beating upon the world of human 
mind with the greatest possible force, and through 
it all there runs a chord of harmony. Kound all that 
wonderful diversity there is a thread of spiritual 
law, of mighty purpose, of Infinite Intelligence, the 
mighty directing power, which in its own order, 
time, place, condition, is expressing that power — 
all the possible power. 

Think you that this could have been a different 
age ? How could the law of gravitation have been 
any different ? Just as well imagine that the uni- 
verse could have been something else as to imagine 
that the course of history could have been difi'erent 
from what it is. Could George Washington have 
come had Oliver Cromwell never lived? Could 
there have been an Oliver Cromwell if Martin 



The Influence of Inspiration on Man. 1 13 

Luther, " the sledge-hammer of the German Refor- 
mation," had not lived ? Could the reformation 
have come at all if there had not been Saracenic 
wars with the Christians? Could the Anglo-Saxon 
race have blessed the world with its intellectual 
power had not the Roman world gathered the cults 
of the East and the South, and the patriotic cults of 
the North and West, and moulded them into a posi- 
tive equilibrium and run them into the life and 
faith of Europe ? Every event, every man, every 
spirit, the universe, consciousness, hang in the 
equilibrium of law, and intelligence is using law 
for the grand expression of the highest power. 

This is not Calvinism either, this is not fatalism, 
but this is the law of conscious infinite life, and the 
— Gnos — that which you know, that which knows; 
that Eternal Gnos is the highest expression of Infi- 
nite Intelligence. Now, upon this the great civiliza- 
tion of the future is going to turn. This conception 
of the Infinite will win in the intellectual civiliza- 
tion. Creeds are tottering to their fall ; faith is 
growing in the omnipotence of the spiritual world, 
but faith in formulated dogma is passing away — it 
has done its work, which was the expression for 
an ignorant age — it was the lever with which to lift 
the religous thought and character of a barbaric 
time. But man is touched by a higher power, it is 
the power of a growing intellect, and as he becomes 
more sure of the ground on which he stands the 



114 The Influence of Inspiration on Man. 

more clearly he will see how he is touched, inspired, 
manipulated, used for the general expression of the 
spiritul stages. When you come to study deeply, 
these are the lessons of the spirit; when you come 
to study deeply into these great problems, you will 
find that your consciousness is largely a spiritual 
consciousness now, and that to a very large extent 
your deductive faculties are in that plane of being, 
and that, though unconscious of being aided by 
spiritual beings, you are really, through those 
mighty cells of the brain, breathing the thought 
of spiritual atmosphere ; you rise to the conception 
that the brain cellular arrangement is but a mental 
system of expansive lungs to take in the great 
activities of the thought world. 

The more humanity can realize and come to the 
standpoint of this high faith the more the signifi- 
cance of the teaching of the Apostle Paul will be 
apparent, that " Faith is the substance of things 
hoped for. " That which you want you will create ; 
that which you need you shall have. If you have 
faith like a grain of mustard seed you shall move 
that mountain. You shall make your angelhood 
by your life and by your faith. If you have no 
faith you will not progress. 

What is the difference between the man who 
succeeds on a financial plane on earth and the man 
who fails? The man who succeeds has the boldness 
of faith ; the man who fails sees that tide in the 



The Influence of Inspiration on Man. 115 

affairs of men come to a flood and hesitates, runs 
back, does not advance to his opportunity — no 
faith. Faith builds immortality, and when man 
shall rise to his faith, when he shall know the truth, 
the truth of the soul's power to create, he will have 
faith. There is no reason why a man should not 
live until he is a thousand years old. Why cannot 
he live till he is a thousand years old? Because 
he has not come to the truth, to the law of vital 
co-relation ; when he knows it he will have faith, 
his faith will be in accordance with his knowledge, 
and with faith he can rise to his immortality. The 
poet wrote wiser then he knew when he wrote, — 

" Music raised a mortal to the skies 
And brought an angel down." 

This is a truth. It is harmony, it is the truth; 
truth is harmony, and it is that which brings an 
angel down. 

Study the writing of Shakespeare. Love him, 
That love strikes his sphere, and to you that soul 
descends and bathes you with its light. Have you 
faith? He can manifest to you the mighty phe- 
nomena of his thought. You can grow to your 
faith ; you will rise to your faith. See what it does 
in the schools, in the world, in mathematics, in 
speculation — everywhere. Rise to your knowledge ; 
rise to your faith. 

When it becomes a matter of health, a knowl- 
edge of the truth brings faith, and the bodily pow- 



116 The Influence op Inspiration on Man. 

ers become stronger, and you extend the cable line 
of physical life. 

Look at the life of that great statesman, Benja- 
min Disraeli. What a gigantic struggle from sim- 
ple beginnings it made. Watch him as he comes 
up. He said, "I want to be the Prime Minister of 
England." That sensitive organization yields to 
the power of spiritual ambition and spirits of his 
race — inspirational conditions of the spheres — bend 
their powers, saying, " He shall be Prime Minister 
of England," and the faith grows in him, and he 
becomes the Prime Minister of England, and faith 
has done its work. What then? No more brain 
cells to make, no more work to do; the field of 
ambition filled, done, completed, he dies, and dies 
because faith is done. The power of life is ex- 
hausted, and he goes away. 

The power of the soul, the power of the sex life, 
the power of the angel, the domination of this 
mighty law you are just touching, and because you 
are only just touching it the movement of progres- 
sive thought seems to be flying to atoms. Here 
one man gets a glimpse of the thought, here another 
man gets another glimpse, and they are tearing one 
another to pieces; but it is all the spiritul world; it 
is all Spiritualism, lifting the human race to a 
higher and a grander expression. 



LECTURE VI. 

POWER. 

The power of intelligence is to express. The 
intelligent mind is seeking to express the fullness 
of its power. The soul, functioning through the 
intellect, is endeavoring to express its power. The 
flowers of springtime are expressions of power. 
The oak grows in the forest, in silence express- 
ing; in silence it grows for a thousand years; no 
tumult, no loud blowing of trumpets, it silently 
attends to its own business, expressing the power. 
The true life is to express the power, not denying it ; 
not to vacate obligation, but to express the power. 

All that a man has attained in expression is the 
work of the power. That expression may have 
been delayed by powerful circumstances, modified 
by conditions over which the power had no efficient 
commanding control. 

Man physically and mentally is an expression of 
power. The sum of all men's power is that which is 
felt in the world, diversified by states, faculty, and 
organizatioti. There is not a faculty in the mind 
of man that is an evil faculty. When wrong is 

done it is a violation of the proper use of power. 

117 



118 Power. 

The highest use of power is to make it possible 
for a still higher use of power. You are seeking 
more power, and you can only attain more power 
by using the power you have correctly. 

The animal powers of man are not evil powers, 
necessary powers; they will be discarded by power 
when power wants them no more. 

You are compelled to live in a competitive world; 
you have to compete with the changing seasons; 
you have to fight the differentiated powers of nature. 
You have to seek to know the order and procession 
of events, the power and potency of vitality in 
vegetable nature; you have to learn thrift and 
economy of your resources and your possessions. 
A waste of power is seen because it brings weak- 
ness; a waste of time is seen because it brings 
delay to the expression of power. 

The unwise use of the mind, for purposes of 
extended pleasure, immoderate pleasure, is seen; 
it delays the expression of power. No man can 
play with power. Nature is the most earnest thing 
you will ever find in the sphere of being. You 
cannot delay nor trifle with nature. Nature never 
forgives; nature does not overlook a mistake. If 
you cannot correctly answer the problems pro- 
pounded to you by the Sphinx, you must suffer the 
consequences. Nature abhors neglect. Nature 
closes her door against you till you acquire the 
ability to open it. Fire will burn when j^'ou put your 




Uo, 



Power. 119 

finger in it. A pope of Rome might put his finger 
into the fire and it would burn; a South Sea 
Islander might put his finger into the fire and it 
would burn. 
_V- The moral laws of nature do not suspend the 
physical laws of nature. You may be the best 
husband the Lord ever made, and have a poor 
digestion; you may be the best wife the sun ever 
shone upon and you may be subject to consumption. 
The moral states of nature do not abrogate physical 
laws. You may be as good as an archangel, but you 
are liable to typhoid fever. Moral states, however 
exalted, do not relieve you from physical con- 
sequences. Nature will express her power. Nature 
is not a murderer, because nature is sovereign; 
power is absolute. You stand related to that 
power; you have no moral claims upon that power; 
your morality is founded upon the highest use of 
your conscious power. 

The sooner you can learn the lessons of nature the 
sooner will follow happiness — the millennium of 
consciousness. Happiness is not pleasure. Happi- 
ness is the great harmony of all the faculties of the 
soul — power doing its work correctly. 

Your place in nature is an honorable one ; you are 
the crowning work of the evolution of power; on 
the physical plane the mind of man is the highest 
product; on the spiritual plane the spiritual con- 
sciousness is the highest product ; on the celestial 



/ 



I 



/> 



120 Power. 

plane the celestial consciousness is the highest 
product 

The consciousness on the material plane is 
inspired by the consciousness on the spiritual 
plane ; the consciousness on the spiritual plane is 
inspired by the consciousness of the celestial plane ; 
the happiness of all secured by a correct expres- 
sion of the faculties of consciousness; that con- 
sciousness seeking the securest and the fittest place 
in nature. 

All arbitrary systems have a human guidance 
not in harmony with nature, and being artificial 
will come to naught. All the religions in the world 
not in harmony with the laws of nature will come 
to naught. They will serve their day, they will do 
their work under the conception, under the power 
as it could feel, sense and know. 

Power is developing knowledge ; knowledge 
comes from experience and inspiration ; knowledge 
when attained covers the fact and the law of the 
phenomenon. Knowledge was power when George 
Stephenson conceived the principle and structure 
of that elemental locomotive steam engine; know- 
ledge was power when Edison conceived the basic 
principle of stored electrical energy — Power, when 
you know nature. When man knew that iron was 
harder than stone he acquired a bit of knowledge 
that lifted the degrees of civilization. When man 
could make a saw that would cut the oak tree he 



Power — Master Workman. 121 

had gained a bit of knowledge that would give him 
power and advance civilization. 

Man stands to-day in the flood of incoming know- 
ledge, and this knowledge is the Logos, the Savior 
of the World ; knowledge of spirit ; knowledge of 
moral law; knowledge of life, social organization, 
government, jurisprudence, liberty, the powers of 
imagination, the beautiful, the harmonious. 

The universe responds at the feet of Intelligent 
Power. 

MASTER WORKMAN 

It was said of Henry Brougham, Lord Chancellor 
of England, that had he been a bootblack he would 
never have been satisfied until he was the best 
bootblack that ever lived. There is no question 
but it is a very high and a very grand ideal for a 
workman to determine to be the best workman at 
his trade that ever pursued it; for the scholar to be 
the best scholar that ever lived; for an orator to be 
the best orator that ever lived; for a statesman to 
be the best statesman that ever lived. Virtuous in 
a way, indeed, is such a resolution; bright indeed is 
such an ambition. Deplorable in any age of the 
world when the workman is an inefficient workman. 
It is taken for granted that every workman will 
be efficient, and the master workman is he who 
thoroughly knows his trade — knows the art of his 



122 Power— Master Workman. 

trade — knows all liis trade. This is the veritable, 
the real workman. 

There used to be in the world master workmen, 
who really were master workmen ; there were men 
who could make a shoe from start to finish — could 
make it, knew how it should be made — could make 
a good shoe — because they were master workmen. 
Since that time changes have come, and there has 
come a master without being a workman. He is a 
man who has power, money — capital it is called in 
economical studies. A capitalist has come, and 
with his lordship commands and holds the present 
form of civilization in his grip. Money is the ver- 
itable god at the beginning of the twentieth cen- 
tury — that sterling power that can be carried about; 
that can buy commodities; that can buy pleasures; 
that can build large houses; that can even make 
shoddy statesmen — Money ! the god of the opening 
twentieth century ! 

This is an age of avarice, but that is not correct 
altogether, it is only a half truth; it only specifies 
a part of the human race, for I do hold that the 
master workman is not dead, absolutely dead, abso- 
lutely blown off the face of this planet : I do not 
hold that by any means. I still am conservative 
enough to believe that there are men who love art 
more than money, and who love justice more than 
money. I do verily and positively believe that 
there are statesmen in the United States that love 



Power — Master Workman. 123 

their country, that love liberty, that love justice, 
more than money. But I do believe that there are 
more weak-kneed statesmen in the world who 
worship money more than liberty than ever in the 
world before. There is a tendency to overdo every 
noble and worthy pursuit. Ask the boy going to 
the art school what is his ambition; the reply 
comes, " To be the best artist." This is egoism of 
the narrowest kind. What man would not wish 
to wield the brush and genius of a Raphael ? But 
that is not enough. A good artist that can paint a 
picture and cannot love his children is a mal-formed 
man. A great artist who can charm the world with 
his pigments when he cannot expand his spiritual 
nature into the broad avenues of human life is a 
kind of a natural freak. That is not what you 
want. You want a better formed man than that. 
A master workman truly, but nothing more — a 
hump-backed man anyhow. The soul demands, 
the spiritual world demands, a better man than a 
lop-sided man. It wants a man with all his facul- 
ties harmoniously at work. The cook that can only 
make Scotch porridge is not fit for Washington. 
The cook must know the properties of foods and be 
a good cook ; virtue truly, but only a cook — a man 
and only a cook! A man and only a painter; a 
man and only a statesman ; a man and only a par- 
rot! That is not enough. The whole field of intel- 
lectual life is demanded for an activity at your 



124 Power — Master Workman. 

hands. Thy perceptive faculties have been given 
to thee to be used. Some men go though the world 
and never use their eyes ; they have eyes and see 
not. 

" A primrose by the river's brim 
A yellow primrose is to him, 
And nothing more." 

When he goes to your wonderful congressional 
library he sees marble form, paint, and nothing 
more. When with his eyes he looks at Turner's 
magnificent paintings he sees a piece of paint and 
nothing more. He sees not a soul there, for in the 
painting there is a soul ; in the library there is a 
soul, and perception is to be used to see the soul. 
To see the form only and not feel that flapping of 
the angels' wings in thy consciousness is to be 
blind. Bring to nature thy eyesight. Behold the 
flowers; what are they? They are souls, when you 
can see them. Behold the animals which live in 
jungle, tree and plain, what are they? Mere forms! 
automata! Verily thou art blind, for these are 
souls, wrought out in workmanship by the master 
workman, the mighty worker in this universe ; and 
thy brotherhood is with the denizen of the forest, 
the jungle, and the plain. The moral dictates of 
conscience are applied to all forms of life. 

A mother loves her child, the cat its kitten. The 
mother loves her child better than her neighbor's 
child. What grander form of expression would it 



Power — Master Workman. 125 

be if that mother could love her neighbor's child as 
well as her own ? What power that would be if an 
artist could love the picture drawn by another artist 
as well as he loves his own ? 

How different it would be if the magnate million- 
aires should love the poor man's pocket as well 
as they love their own. If the soul could express 
that equal fraternal love, what ^ change this world 
would see. That love would invade the workshop, 
it would live upon the farm, and it would dwell 
in the kitchen — everywhere — is not that what you 
want? Would not that be your heaven ? If every 
man, woman and child had the development of the 
love right in its fullness ; if you had no place in 
your heart to cherish envy, no place in your heart 
for dislike, no place for covetousness, your soul 
would be a spiritual paradise. Are you doing any- 
thing for yourself to bring you to that spot of con- 
sciousness where you can love every man, woman 
and child, or are you trying to love one, to wor- 
ship one ; to adore and make a god or goddess of 
just one ? Put this question : Will it not be the 
highest and grandest flower of happiness when the 
eyes of the body, and love, and intuition, will be 
so perfect as to see equal beauty everywhere, and 
equal rights everywhere, and love developed to 
respect them ? That does seem to me to be the 
best and the most earnest work for a human soul 
to set about doing here ; where he can see a blem- 



126 Power — Master Workman. 

ish let him try and remedy it; where he can see 
imperfection let him try to bring perfection ; and, 
first of all, he can do this for himself in his own 
nature. 

The trouble with this age is that men think 
all men inefficient but themselves. All men are 
mortal. All men will die. I am immortal ; I 
will not die. Unrealized error, mistake, imperfec- 
tion. You are more liable to see imperfection in 
another than in yourselves. Now this is the condi- 
tion. I am not blaming you, bless you, not at all, 
but we are reasoning upon the big moral man ; we 
are trying to build the master workman that we can 
be the fullest, the roundest, the most just and the 
most loving master workman that ever touched the 
earth. This ambition appears to me to be the real 
ambition, to be great in every faculty, wise in every 
act, noble in every love. What for? To attain hap- 
piness. Happiness can only be attained by the slow 
ascent of virtuous paths. What is virtue? Is virtue 
weight for weight? When a man gives a yard of 
cloth for a dollar, is that virtue? Oh no, that is 
not virtue. When the farmer's wife gives a pound 
of butter for twenty-five cents, is that virtue ? No ! 
What is virtue ? Why this is virtue : when the 
farmer's wife gives you a pound of butter for 
twenty -five cents, then puts a little bit on besides; 
it is that added little bit that is virtue. Weight for 
weight is not virtue. Giving something that right- 



Power — Master Workman. 127 

fully belongs to thee — self-sacrifice — is virtue ; and 
the fine lady that sulks because she cannot have 
the highest place in the banqueting hall has no 
virtue. Her egoism is perfect, and whether she sits 
at the head of the table or at the foot of the table 
she is the least person at the table. 

He who wants to be the president and leader of 
a spiritual organization, a society, that wants it for 
his own honor and not the development of the 
truth, is no leader at all — a sham. I am not per- 
sonal; merely took it for an illustration to show 
you that the egoism of life is not virtue. 

You must be noble, you must sacrifice self for 
the good of others. Why? Because the human 
conditions are today imperiled. But why should 
you do it ? That the higher egoism of the celestial 
states may unfold ; that thy master workman may 
be perfect ; that the lines of thy body may correctly 
weave in the lines of truth ; that thy spirituality 
may conform to the celestial standard. How we 
wobble on the moral lines of life, and we say we 
can not help it. How can we help it ? Look how 
marriges are made. Look where wives and hus- 
bands are taken from? See how the family is 
built. See the hovels of vice ; see the drunkenness 
in the world ; see the workshops of the world ; see 
the tyranny of the world ; see the imperfection of 
society. How can you get a correctly made man 
out of these conditions ? I am not blaming any- 



128 Power — Master Workman. 

body. The working out of the power by evolu- 
tionary methods is slow. 

If I could be God for ten minutes — there is no 
blasphemy'- in my heart — 1 am not impugning the 
wisdom of celestial power — but so urgent is my 
philanthrophy, that if I had the power I would take 
every man to pieces and put him together again on 
a higher plane of organization. I would re-shape 
statesman ; I would re-shape capitalist. I would go 
to the stock exchange and I would bore a hole in 
every stockman's head and put in a little bit more 
brain ; and every foolish statesman from the East 
and from the West, I would lift up his scalp and 
breathe into him the breath of a higher life. I 
think when I had done that probably somebody 
would shoot me — unless I could seize him and re- 
model and change him — but this is only my am- 
bition. The great master workman of the universe 
says to me, " Stand off — too much steam — in too big 
a hurrj'^ — I am going there myself, and I will do it. 
I will do it by my power when I am ready." And 
I know that the master workman of this universe 
knows his business, knows it all round; knows it as 
a lover; knows it as a cook; knows it as a manu 
facturer; knows it as an artist, and the universe 
will be all right. And so, having faith in the power 
of the universe, having faith in the power of 
natural intelligence, I go my way, but in going my 
way I make my thought my best thought ; my best 



Power — Master Workman. 129 

thought is my God-thought. I make my God- 
thought utterable, and my God-thought becomes 
an element in the evolution of the spiritual condi- 
tions of the world. 

Unless the emphasis of my moral adhesiveness 
causes me to send out, how can my fellow beings 
take that which I do ? I must express, that I may 
awaken another. I must rouse myself, that the 
sleeping soul of another may be roused. Paul may 
plant and Apollos may water, but God giveth the 
increase. I can bring my truth, I can knock at 
your door of consciousness, I can ring the bell, but 
I can not make you awaken. I may throw the 
treasures of the world's knowledge before you, but 
I cannot make you take them. I may lead the 
horse to the well, but I can not make him drink. I 
can do this, it is my work; it is the work of the 
master workman of the universe commanding me. 
I like the work — that is my virtue — and if you are 
awakened by my knocking at your door — in other 
words, dropping the simile — if you can rise to your 
consciousness through a view of my consciousness, 
the law of evolution has elevated you to my plane. 

This, then, is the true work of every man and of 
every woman. I like to see beauty. I love the 
beautiful. Why? Because it awakens the beau- 
tiful. Why does art help man ? Becaue it helps him 
to the esthetic, the interior beautiful in himself. 
Show me a people without a love of art — show me 



130 Power — Master Workman. 

a man without a picture in his house, and I will 
show you a man with a blunted moral nature ; I 
will show you a man who has not awakened to life. 
Show me a man who is so conditioned in life that he 
is contented to live and work for a hundred dollars 
a year, and I will show you a soul that is in slavery. 
If I can make men love the beautiful ; if I can make 
men love virtue and wisdom, and can make men 
have virtue, wisdom and knowledge, I can cure the 
ills of society; I can kill bad goverment; I can kill 
despots; I can topple the crowns of empires in the 
dust; I can resurrect humanity; I can make an era 
of higher civilization ; I can make the brotherhood 
of man a reality. If I can stimulate knowledge I 
can kill trusts and millionaires, and bring an era of 
justice and humanity with knowledge. 

Show me a people that have not resources with 
which to buy and I will show you a people that are 
ignorant. If I were to take you to Spain I could 
show you a man living one year on one hundred 
dollars. A man so living cannot be a light to 
stimulate art nor create a demand for the commo- 
dities of commerce. He must demand higher 
wages, and the demand can only come with intel- 
ligence, with the growth of intelligence. An intel- 
ligent community of men cannot be enslaved, 
cannot be imposed upon by combination ; and an 
awakened people cannot be the slaves of the 
moneyocracy. 



Power — Master Workman. 131 

But when you are led to the lowest planes of 
intelligence and reason, despots are born. They 
come in the law of necessity. Then look to your 
workmanship, to your education, to your thought, 
to your life. Master these things that are the out- 
come of conditions, and when you are ready you 
can throw them off. You could not wear the 
armor of the middle ages; you could not wear the 
breeches you wore when you were boys ; you can 
wear what you can wear, that is all. But you can 
look out of the window of desire. The teaching 
that tells vou not to desire any more will make 
slaves^f J^ie^hjam^^ The teaching that tells 

you to renounce that which nature has given j'^ou 
for your good is a teaching that if accepted will 
end the reign of civilization. It has done it with 
past civilizations. Why was Christianity accepted 
by the world — by the European world — why ? Be- 
cause it set aside the renunciation of the faculties 
of the soul by the substitution of the atonement; it 
was a link in the evolution of the moral and spir- 
itual qualities of the human race. And while the 
old religion has no monopoly of spiritual truth, and 
all religions have a little spiritual truth, and all 
systems of morality some good, and all social or- 
ganizations some virtue, the conditions of general 
life are the products of the past mingling with the 
inspirations of the present. 
But I must leave you. I want you to realize that 




132 Power — Master Workman. 

the spiritual world is only a stepping stone; that you 
are not finished, not completed, when you have 
passed from this life into the life which is to come. 
When millions of ages shall have rolled o'er you, 
you are climbing still ; mountains on mountains 
still arise ; the Empire of Life is before you, and 
God more marvelous — God is the eternal mystery ; 
God is the eternal life for which you search ; the 
eternal harmony. The better you get the better 
you seek to become; the wiser you get the wiser 
you want to be ; the sweep of your consciousness cov- 
ering two or more modes of nature, the more modes 
of nature you want to cover. You want to see a 
chicken from the next hatching; you want to see the 
next child; you want to see the next thought, the 
next life, the next empire of being. Chained to thy 
state, in the hollow of the Infinite Hand, thy life 
goes on, but that life is expression ; thou art to 
express — a chain — a link — to express. In the no- 
bility of thy eternal expression are found the de- 
lights, the glories of the infinite revealed. Life is 
work. Launch into life, never to be vacated, and 
sail up and on into the eternal ages, and express 
thyself. No man then is enslaved ; enslaves no one. 
But in the empire of thy wisest art, in the country 
of thy brighest love, raise humanity to the highest 
ideal, and do thy duty now. 



LECTURE VII. 

PROGRESS OP LIBERTY. 

There has never been in any age of time so much 
confidence reposed in the judgment of the democ- 
racy as now. By the democracy I mean the peo- 
ple. In all ages of the world those entrusted with 
or usurping social or political power have been 
jealous of the prerogative of the people, they have 
never trusted the people, and the people equally on 
their side have never trusted their leaders. The 
old conservatism, characteristic of the leading and 
dominating minds by the force of the past associa- 
tion, never admitted into its confidence the common 
people, but disputed the claim that the people were 
proper custodians of religious truth or political 
domination. 

The sword of Bunker Hill represents and is the 
spirit of a period of time when confidence in the 
people had begun to arise. That confidence arose 
out of the decay of powerfully organized religious 
communities. It may be somewhat of a new in- 
spiration to you to be told that the American 
revolution sprung out of religious conditions rather 
than economical conditions ; that it arose out of the 

»33 



134 Progress op Liberty. 

conditions and the dissolution of the unity of the 
Christian faith, and that the attempt to unify and 
put into a classified expression true religious 
thoughts failed in its comprehensiveness to cover 
the people. All acts of conformity, to compel the 
people to believe certain stipulated and defined 
dogmas, have failed, when the age has been an in- 
tellectual one. 

A spiritual struggle occurred in the age of Oliver 
Cromwell — an epoch man — a man of divine inspi- 
ration, of noble spiritual mould. I fear that this 
eulogy on Oliver Cromwell may fall upon your ears 
with somewhat of a startling announcement, for 
some of you have been accustomed to read histories 
which are but a very imperfect representation of 
the Cromwellian epoch, and what the man stood for; 
for let me now declare that when you have in your 
midst a great man, he is trusted because he repre- 
sents the spiritual center in which he moves — he is 
either a builder or a destroyer, possibly both — and 
this age of Oliver Cromwell represented a spiritual 
power that was working for the emancipation of 
the civil and intellectual conditions of the human 
family. 

The cause of liberty knows no country, the cause 
of justice knows no clan, they are sacred and divine 
causes, and Oliver represented that wing of pro- 
gressive thought that despised and held in contempt 
the conservative methods of the old world of re- 



Progress of Liberty. 135 

ligion and politics. Indeed, I may say that in 
Oliver there was not even a beginning, but that a 
chain of spiritual causes had led from period to 
period until he presents himself, and it may be 
interesting to you if I for a moment sketch how a 
great man is produced. 

It is not enough to merely say that a man is great 
because his temperament is fine; that the brain 
cells and areas are numerous, and that there is a 
large vitality. Men are not great because of these 
conditions alone, but when these conditions are 
present in an organization, and suitable spiritual 
states and demands are present and in existence, 
then it can be possible for a man to be great, and a 
spiritual world make its great men. There never 
did — this is a bold declaration — there never did 
walk the pathways of great power when in your 
world a man who was not the pivotal expression of 
the power and thought of a spiritual world. When 
circumstances in the objective world have come to 
such a state of maturity that the expression of a 
great thought becomes necessary, the man or woman 
appears to express that thought by purpose, by 
design — the great man appears. By whose pur- 
pose ? By whose design does the great man appear ? 
By the purpose and design of intelligent, masterful, 
magnanimous intelligences unfolded in the spir- 
itual world, and through its power of concentrating 
magnetism it throws that magnetism with all its 



136 Progress op Liberty. 

fund of psychographs — with all its details of spirit- 
ual karma — they throw it on the soul sphere that is 
gestating a body in the womb of mother life, and 
add to — contribute to — the development of that 
life. It is the incarnation of spiritual power, the 
incarnation of a psychograph ; that which is in the 
magnetism of the spiritual being is planted in the 
life that is gestating in the mother's womb, to be 
matured by circumstances that are foreseen will 
follow. 

Can you for a moment conceive that beings in 
the spiritual world, endowed with capacity to fore- 
see the coming of a series of events that would be 
damaging to the human race, that they would not 
make some attempts to avoid, to defeat, or j)ut back 
the threatened danger to the growth of the human 
race? Did it not in 1812 look as if the fiery genius 
of the first Napoleon was going to destroy and wither 
up the legacy of the ages ? Did it not look as if his 
vaulting ambition was going to strip every country 
of its traditional power, the characteristics of its 
past, and the genius of its civilization? But there 
immediately arose on the horizon of the mentality 
of Europe a mental power adequate to deal with 
the conditions made by this fiery genius of Napo- 
leon. I am not doing any injustice to this remark- 
able man. I know that the majority of men are 
not yet prepared to do justice to the extraordinary 
Oorsican that lit his watch-fires and cast terror into 



Progress of Liberty. 137 

Europe. This extraordinary man had a mission — 
he was a projection from the spiritual world for the 
purpose of clearing Europe from the dominating 
power of conservative feudalism. It required all 
this power to liberate man. Sometimes you have 
to cause a great deal of pain to cure the toothache 
— you have to extract the tooth. So in the devel- 
opment of human progress it comes through cutting 
off the dead limbs, the obstructive limbs of the tree, 
aud making it possible for new centers of inspi- 
ration to come. 

It seemed inevitable in 632 that Europe would 
be covered by the power, the spirits and the spirit- 
ualism of Mohammedanism. There did not seem to 
be a fortress, a bulwark, or a sword that could hurl 
back from Europe the ranks of the Saracens. Why ? 
The Saracens were advanced in literature, they had 
a civilization superior to the civilization of the 
nations of Europe ; the Roman Empire had broken 
to pieces, the influence of Christianity had decayed, 
the national life had been affected by the religious 
teachings of the time, and the hope and love of man 
were centered in the domain of faith and spiritual 
attainment. The world was despised; the paradise 
beyond the skies coveted, desired and adored. 
Human life was held cheap. The achievements of 
toil, the gift of intellect and power lightly esteemed 
by men who were the children of God and heirs of 
immortality. The contemplation was to get through 



138 Progress of Liberty. 

this life as quickly as possible, and enter into the 
kingdom where the Lord Christ ruled in love and 
righteousness. This was the attitude of the seventh 
century in Europe. But the bold, chivalrous, daring, 
cultured, Saracen pointed his sword and ambition 
towards the cities of Europe, and looked with avar- 
icious design on the conquest of Europe, and the 
planting of the thought of his prophet where the 
Roman Empire had held its magnificent authority. 
But in the darkness of that time, in that hour 
which seemed left to despair, there arose a man, a 
child of violence and of blood. It was the sword of 
Charles Martel that drove back the Saracen, and it 
seemed to be an accident of history. It was no 
accident ; but because of that sword-play of Charles 
Martel you are not Mohammedans in Washington ? 
Had that sword not been victorious every one of 
you would have been Mohammedans today. The 
power of Rome would have been lost in the velocity 
of the transformation ; Trinitarianism would have 
sunk into Unitarianism, and the anthropomorphism 
of Mohammedanism would have covered Europe. 
It took nearly a thousand years of expression 
to settle that problem. Problems are not easily 
settled. 

If you settle the Philippine problem in two hun- 
dred years you will do well. If England endeavors 
to assimilate the civilization of the Boers in five 
hundred years, England will do well. If England 



Progress op Liberty. 139 

assimilates the sympathy of Ireland in ten thousand 
years, England will do well. 

The spiritual conditions have to be considered. 
It is not the sword that settles, but it is the God of 
Thought that does the work. Any philosophy of 
history that leaves out of the consideration the cause- 
world has not given a correct picture of history. In 
the thousand years following the sword-point of 
Charles Martel followed an eternal vigilence of 
conflict between the two great religious systems, 
Mohammedanism and Christianity. In armed, hot 
revengeful attitude they faced one another, and after 
the preaching of Peter, the Hermit, Europe flew to 
arms to recover the shrine of of the Saviour of the 
world from the Saracens, and it took two hundred 
and fifty years of blood and slaughter to cure 
Europe of that mania. What was the result ? The 
Reformation was born. Where did the reformation 
come from? It came from the spiritual world, 
through Saracenic action. The culture of the Mo- 
hammedan put sense into the Christian's head, and 
after the Christians had in convivility and inter- 
course mingled with the people of Asia and with 
the people of Africa, they began to feel the power 
of a new mentality. It led to the emancipation of 
Europe. What were the painters doing at that time, 
the divinely gifted — the men of genius with clear 
brain and skillful brush — the exponents of heaven ? 
Why, they were painting Madonnas : the ideal 



140 Progress of Liberty. 

mother. Great theme I Who can paint a mother? By 
the very truth, no man ever can paint the thought 
of mother. The painters of the Renaissance were 
painting Madonnas, presenting in form the spirit 
of that mother, and that is what you look at when 
you see the Virgin Mary —you are looking at man's 
attempt to paint the mother, to paint the thought- 
mother ; the mother-thought ; the mother that is 
God. 

And then that day rolled by and the spiritual 
world came clear to earth. The painter was eman- 
cipated. There came freedom to earth, and what 
was the result ? The painter went to nature and 
imitated nature. He painted the woodland and 
the meadow ; he painted the face and the heart of 
man ; tragedy and victory ; love and hate ; ideality 
and the esthetic came in turn. What a wonderful 
change. That was the birthplace of human liberty. 
That made it possible for Oliver Cromwell. If these 
conditions had not come, old Oliver could not have 
come. If Oliver could not have come, you could 
not. In the line of cause you follow the order and 
the law of the spiritual world. 

In the tenth century, when the thousand years 
were completed after the so-called crucifixion, men 
believed that the end of the world had come. A 
great delusion. The end of an epoch had come, 
surely ; new ideals were coming ; and some of the 
lawyers at that age declined to make a deed. It 



Pkogress of Liberty. 141 

was no use, the world was to come to an end. 
Merchants would not buy. A stagnation in affairs. 
The end of the world! It did not come. This was 
the first shock that the Christian world received, 
and that shock awakened it and made a change in 
the philosophy. It gave a shock to that charac- 
terization of the Aristotelian faith that came into 
Christianity, and it made Platonism popular for 
nearly a hundred and fifty years. 

The spiritual world is working, incarnating thought 
all the time ; producing phenomenal conditions all 
the time; then there comes another tremendous 
shock, never had Christianity received such a shock 
before that, and it made the reformation a com- 
plete success in some countries. What was that ? 
The astronomer treading upon the geocentric hypo- 
thesis, that is, that the earth was the center of 
the universe ; that the stars were made to light the 
earth by night ; that the sun was set in the heavens 
to light the earth by day; that the earth was flat; 
that up there was a firmament, and this firmament 
was a floor ; that above the firmament was heaven ; 
that God had His throne there, just up there above 
the firmament. It was a solid floor on which heaven 
was placed. All the angels were up there. When 
Columbus touched the shores of the New World that 
was the thought of Christendom. The trouble he 
had was that his men were afraid they would sail to 
the edge and drop ofi". That was the trouble, that 



142 Progress of Liberty. 

there was a dropping off place, and if they only 
went there they would drop and drop and continue 
dropping forever. What a horrible thought, what a 
dreadful picture ! But the men were children. 
They were honest; they had fear; they believed as 
they were taught. That was the faith of Christen- 
dom, and when it was declared by the astronomers 
that there was no firmament there at all, that it was 
all space, why, they saw in a moment at Rome that 
that would not do — there was no heaven any more! 
There is no place to put the throne of God any 
more; there is no heaven; and the persecutions 
that followed were something terrible. That was 
the greatest shock Christianity ever had, and it led 
to the birthplace of the reformation. It led to the 
development of intellect. It was astronomy that 
knocked the bottom out of Christianity. 

Out of these conditions grew others that made it 
better for man, for intellectual and for the spiritual 
world. It probed the materialism of Christianity, for 
what was Christianity then but materialism ? Just a 
world where there was an eternal prayer meeting 
before the throne of God. Oh, what a monotony 1 
Think of it. The spiritual world was bright on one 
side and a curse on the other. The thought was, 
believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and if thou believest 
thou shalt have a crown and a palm and everlasting 
happiness; for the rejection of this gospel thy soul 
shall go to everlasting fagot and to everlasting 



Progress of Liberty. 143 

flame. Believe me and be happy ; disbelive me 
and be damned. That was liberty for you ; that was 
the despotism against which men rebelled ; this was 
the emancipation of the human race. 

In the fourteenth century one of the greatest 
thinkers of the century declared that if God Al- 
mighty said wrong was right wrong would be right! 
Against that Arminianism protested that God Al- 
mighty could not make wrong right. That was a 
limitation of the infinite. That was the first time 
God had his head cut off by the Christians, but they 
have been decapitating him every century since, 
changing the God ideal. I am not blaming anybody. 
It was wise, it was good that the development of 
man as man became better and his conception of 
God became higher. The conception is growing in 
this day. All these changes were produced in the 
spiritual world, and man was simply working out 
the results of that power. It would hardly be a 
popular thought for me to utter at this moment, 
but I will venture the expression any way. You 
remember that there were very dark days in this 
city in 1863; very dark days when this city was 
threatened by the marshaled hosts of an uncon- 
quered South ; when the waters of the Potomac ran 
red with the best blood of the earth. Those were 
dark days. One of the sweetest natures heaven ever 
made was struggling for a united country in the 
environments of the White House, a great soul, an 



144 Progress of Liberty. 

extraordinary man. But another man was yet 
lingering in tlie lap of mystery. This nation was 
looking for the man that could strike the blow and 
end the rebellion. Out of the darkness, out of the 
fog, a figure rises on the meteoric sky, a marvel, 
and the sword of Grant shines in the sunlight and 
the mighty republic stands firm and indivisible 
forever. 

The spiritual world is seen in the providence of 
nations and of men. You tell me that nature is 
under law; I tell you that history is under law; 
I tell you that the human race is under law, and 
that no wild blind chance is regulating the destiny 
of life ; that you are not rocked in the cradle of the 
infinite deep without a guiding star; that thy soul 
is not left to steal blindly its way through the 
breakers of the ages. That little boy of thine, with 
curly hair and sweet blue eyes, that thy afi"ection 
nursed with doting pride and love, that little boy 
that loved thee and went his way into the invisible 
is safe in the hands of the infinite, held like yonder 
shining star, and never a soul was lost in the 
byways and forests of eternal life. 

A mother weeps yonder in her solitary chamber ; 
that man who loved her, cared for her, watched her 
wants, has gone from her side to yonder world. She 
weeps; she is alone. But that frail heart, stagger- 
ing under the grief and woe, plunged in the depths 
of despair, is as safe in the hollow of the hand of 



Progress of Liberty, 145 

of the infinite as yonder worlds that play their 
games in the meadows of infinite space. 

There is law governing and holding the hnman 
soul, and what thy life meets with, whether it be 
flowers or stones ; whether thy path be over sandy 
deserts, thy feet bleeding in thy struggles with the 
world, or whether it be through palaces and courts 
of ease, smiled on by beauty and belpved by men, 
thy life is following the same majestic necessity, 
expressing itself in the phenomena of life. Thy 
duty is plain. Thy duty is to do thy work today; 
to use thy talent today, this hour, and thus fulfill 
the promise of thy life and inspiration. Tomorrow 
other duties will come to thee. Thy duties now 
discharge and they will be thy preparations for the 
duties of tomorrow and tomorrow into the endless 
ages. Thy growth is the discharge of thy duty. 

Learn a lesson from the lilies of the fields. They 
express according to their power. Listen to the 
bird that sings in woodland glade. Listen ! It 
expresses all it can. Behold the light of stars, 
vigilant in their mechanical duty. Imitate the 
birds, imitate the stars. Child of nature, discharge 
thy duties today. What are they ? They are emo- 
tional, they are intellectual, they are moral, and 
they are spiritual. Drop the seed of knowledge in 
the mental ground of thy neighbor ; speak a kind 
word where a kind word can be spoken ; and if you 
find a man with a larger load than he can carry, if 



146 Progress op Liberty. 

his coat be out at elbow, if he be shoeless and 
hungry, help him, give him a lift on the way, he is 
a man, and some day, in the fields of a grander 
world, he will meet thee again. Love thy neighbor. 
All men are neighbors. Love the spirits that come 
to thee. Seek happiness in the communion of the 
highest, and some fair day, in the sunset of thy 
earthly career, there will come to thy vision the 
darlings of another land, and in the paradise of a 
happier world you will meet the darlings of your 
love to part no more. 



Feb 



'^'♦'vQc 






FEB. 14 1902 



